Parry Nightmare

A particularly nice aspect of the game’s writing is the dialogue with Honno-chan, which frequently clashes quite harshly with the depressive tone of the game by juxtaposing it with an alter ego that is seemingly exactly the opposite: aggressive, energetic, and charismatic, further supporting the superb character design of specifically her as the main character.

Parry Nightmare is an extraordinarily short but very focused and polished bullet hell game about confronting thematic traumas manifesting themselves in the various nightmares of the protagonist.

This is all to say that while gameplay merely consists of a single button to parry as well as your movement keys, the actual gameplay is fairly exciting due to the music and tension of the game quickly spiraling in difficulty if you accidentally fumble a parry and force yourself into the cooldown window.

The gameplay is easy to understand but tough to master, and that difficulty curve really ramps up fast!

The sound design is quite good as well, featuring a variety of different music genres that do exceptionally well at setting the atmosphere of each stage.

While the actual levels are kept fairly minimalistic, especially in the enemy design, the art style is unique and expressive.