For those of you who identify as a banana, you’ll be pleased to know that you’re well represented in Doug’s Nightmare on the PS5 – a game developed by Undev Games and published by Eastasiasoft.
Where to begin? The start, of course. You play as top banana, Doug, and guess what? He’s having a nightmare. A seemingly endless bad dream that’s a twin-stick shootin’ and bullet hell, featuring everything from ketchup grenade-throwing fries to pistol-wieldin’ doughnuts.
The significance of the enemies in Doug’s Nightmare is important because… it’s not important. There’s no relation to Doug’s inner struggles other than he faces anxiety, and his adversaries are also from various food groups (except the bugs and aliens).
As a twin-stick shooter, your job is to navigate a maze of themed locales where you have to clear each room before moving to the next. At the end of the stage, there’s a boss who’s read a book on bullet hell, but their approach is way more forgiving than what one might expect of the genre.
So, Doug plods along and will kill waves of enemies using a melee or range attack, or two of the same if you like. Usually, there are one or two new weapons available per stage, which can be swapped out based on preference, such as power or fire rate. There are no visible stats, and the tooltip is your only guide. However, realistically, you can play Doug’s Nightmare in its entirety with just a melee weapon.
There’s a basic attack and a power attack. For melee, it’s a 360º swing to bash multiple enemies; it is a burst of fire for ranged weapons. Other than that, Doug can also dash, which is best used to collect health or move out of the way of fast-moving baddies.
Besides health, which is replenished through eating sweets, Doug has an anxiety meter, which will drop when enemies are surrounding him. Should it reach zero, his alter-ego – Anx – will appear and keep attacking until you destroy them. The only way to prevent this from happening is to collect teddy bears to keep the anxiety gauge full.
And, as we’re listing things more than anything, there are a fair amount of costumes to equip. Aside from shoes that protect your imaginary feet from Lego blocks, they’re all cosmetic. Oh, some buffs grant extra speed or damage until you die, but it’s easy to miss these things.
Why? On every single stage, I’d managed to fast-track to the boss and not collect everything on the map. This meant a lot of backtracking to collect weapons that could potentially assist or unlock clothing to get an achievement. While there are two difficulty modes, Doug’s Nightmare is easy – the only challenge here is patience and whether you can be bothered to finish it.
Naturally, I finished Doug’s Nightmare, but that felt more like a duty to me. The gameplay is monotonous, and despite some nice illustrations and character variety, it’s for show only, as all the enemies handle the same way to some extent. The only ‘exciting’ parts were the boss battles, and please don’t ask me about the soundtrack. It made me want to rip off my arm and throw it at the TV; it’s repetitive, dull, and also repetitive.
Any saving grace? You could argue that there’s a message towards the end of accepting oneself and taking pleasure in the little things, but that’s more like a passing comment, as it has nothing to do with the gameplay. Despite having a comic book panel intro, the story quickly evaporates until a last-minute thing at the end.
Again, Doug’s Nightmare has nice visuals, and bananas are a good source of potassium. That is all.
