Here is one of the biggest surprises of 2018 for me, the downloadable title Last Year: The Nightmare. While setting things in the ’80s is the “cool thing” these days Last Year: The Nightmare is set in the ’90s and features a bunch of high school kids trying to survive and outwit a killer.
How to Download Last Year: The Nightmare
The game has been made available on Discord. To download it, click the Download link located below the review. If you like asymmetric survival horrors, be sure also to download and check out Dead by Daylight (2016). Here you will be also escaping from a killer. Another game with a similar premise is the free-to-play Deceit (2017).
The Game Review
Last Year: The Nightmare is set in 1996. The game takes place on Halloween where five high school kids find themselves trapped in a nightmare version of their high school. The game has some of that 90’s style including plenty of 90’s ‘tude and that is awesome.
This is a game for six players. There are five high school kids and each one represents a different class. Chad is the popular football team quarterback. Nick is nerdy and a brain. Troy is the cool kid.
Sam is geeky and feels invisible and lastly, we have Amber the prom queen and the mean girl of the bunch. Aren’t these all just stereotypical high school characters? Well yes they are and that is the point and that is their charm. Their interactions are awesome and certainly feel like something you would see in a 90’s horror movie like Scream, The Faculty and so on.
The Killers in Last Year: The Nightmare
One player also gets to play as a supernatural serial killer! As of right now, there are three different killers to play as. The Giant is a big brute of a man who can kick down walls and nothing can stand in his way. Strangler is more sneaky and relies on stalking and sneaking. Slasher does some serious damage with an ax.
Playing as the killer is really cool as you can enter predator mode. This lets you despawn and respawn anywhere on the map as long as it out of sight of the high school kids. You can use this to screw with them, stalk them and plan your attack.
The Survivors
The high schoolers have to work together in order to survive. Currently, there are five of them:
- Chad, a good looking quarterback
- Nick, a nerd in glasses
- Troy, a strategist
- Amber, a mean prom queen
- Sam, an outcast geek
There are various objects that need to be completed before you can escape. Also, there are materials that you need to collect in order to craft weapons.
These are things like baseball bats, stunners and even explosives. You need to do what you can in order to survive the night. Last Year: The Nightmare is the kind of game where teamwork is what you need to do.
There is no good just trying to run off and do it all on your own or just like in a good horror movie. The killer is going to pick you off one at a time. The game handles this very well and is full of many of the clichés that horror movies tend to have, but it does this on purpose and it is one of the things that makes it so much fun.
The Bottom Line
To me Last Year: The Nightmare feels like the game that I wanted Friday the 13th to be, not that Friday the 13th was bad or anything. I love the 90’s and having a game set during this time and being so self-aware of it is really cool.
