Neverending Nightmares puts you in control of Thomas, a man caught in a string of unsettling nightmares. The gameplay, such as it is, involves you walking the halls of whatever location your nightmare has placed you. It may start innocently, with Thomas deciding to go downstairs to get some milk, but things go downhill fast. The hallways are full of doors, which take you through bedrooms, bathrooms and studys that seem to loop back on themselves. Or you enter a room, find it to be a dead end, and re-emerge on a hallway that isn't the same as when you went in.
The shadows may grow thicker, obscuring your view, or the darkness may swallow everything. If you're lucky, the game grants you a lit candle, but for at least one stretch, you're stuck watching a black screen as you walk, ears alert for the sounds of anything else.
Because Thomas will encounter things. Sometimes what seems to be his baby sister, bloody-eyed and dragging an ax. Men with no eyes wrapped in straitjackets, or porcelain dolls that close in if you dally too long in a room. During the nightmares set in the asylum, you're sometimes chased by a maniacally grinning version of yourself, wielding a cleaver.
You don't have much recourse in these situations, except to try and make it through a door. Harder than it sounds. You can make Thomas run by pulling the right trigger, but he's slower than Alan Wake and tires faster, too. Although sometimes, if you meet a danger, you can elude it by simply going back the way you came until you can't hear it any longer. Then when you resume your original course, the danger has mysteriously vanished. One of the game's creators was apparently trying to capture their experiences with mental health issues, but I'm not sure what that would represent, if anything.
If you're caught, you die, but just wake up in a bed and step back out in the hallway where you died. You can't get out of the nightmare that easily. There are different endings depending on which direction you go at certain points in particular nightmares. Step through one door and get your Achilles tendons cut by your sister, step through another and walk off the porch into a void. Sometimes your sister is your sister and a small child. Other times she's your doctor at the asylum, a cold and distant one at that. In one sequence, you wake up in bed with her and she says she's your wife (Thomas is as confused and disturbed as I was, which is nice.)
While Thomas always "wakes up" with a start and breathing hard, his expression through the game doesn't suggest fear so much as confusion, or maybe weariness. His life has blurred into an endless stretch of misery and loneliness, broken up by pain inflicted either by others or himself. The encroaching darkness doesn't bother him. Neither do the monsters; Thomas doesn't see them and quail in terror, though he usually screams at the moment they "kill" him. Which probably says something about his true mental state and that he's not so eager to let go as he might believe.
I don't think I was ever scared while playing; once you figure out he's going to pop back up in bed if he dies, still trapped in his nightmares, it's hard to feel too worried about screwing up and getting him killed. Unnerved maybe, at some of the things Thomas encounters. Amused, that the art style reminded me of the intros to Mystery! on PBS I remember from when I was a kid. Exasperated, definitely, both at how slow Thomas is (though that tracks with a lot of my nightmares, moving like I'm in molasses) and how long it sometimes took to get to the point where something different happened.
It's like, you're walking, you're walking, try this door, oh another cobweb strewn bathroom, onto the next hallway, you're walking, try this door, bloodstain on the wall, you're walking, you're walking, wasn't I just in this bedroom? there's that creepy doll, you're walking, oh I'm back in the dining room, hey things are looking more worn down, maybe we're getting somewhere, still walking.
As a metaphor for feeling trapped in a headspace where every day is empty, save old memories and regret, and there doesn't seem to be an exit from the maze, it's effective. But it's not exactly engaging as a game you're playing. The monsters show up and at least they're something to try and escape or elude.
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