Nitemare 3D

Nitemare 3D (N3D) is a first-person shooter PC game with a horror theme, released by Gray Design Associates in June 1994 on DOS and Windows 3.x platforms. It consisted of three episodes, the first of which was released as a demo. The full release came on two 3½" floppy disks and was accompanied by a guide to the game's thirty levels.

Graphics were very similar to those used in id Software's Wolfenstein 3D games, with perpendicular walls, and no texture on the floors or ceilings. The object of the game was to free the player's girlfriend Penelope from the house of the evil Dr. Hamerstein.



N3D followed the story of Hugo, from the Hugo Trilogy, a series of graphic adventures consisting of Hugo's House of Horrors, Whodunit? and Jungle of Doom. Hugo's girlfriend Penelope has been kidnapped by the evil Dr. Hamerstein for use in heinous experiments. The player must battle through Hamerstein's bizarre mansion, underground caverns complete with prisons and laboratories, and finally through a twisted alternate dimension of demons and aliens in an attempt to save her.

Rather than the fast-paced action of Wolfenstein, Nitemare 3D has a slightly slower, more puzzle-oriented style of play. The four different weapons (plasma gun, magic wand, silver bullet pistol and auto-repeat plasma gun) have different usages—for example, magic blasts were especially useful against magical creatures such as witches, whereas robots were practically immune to them. Meanwhile, vampires took heavy damage from silver bullets, while shrugging off the effects of the plasma gun. Each level in the game had numerous secret panels, some of which were purely for bonuses, but others were essential to completing the level. To make this task easier, the player could collect magic eyes, which enable the player to activate a mini-map in the game's HUD and give hints as to the locations of panels, and crystal balls for displaying the location of enemies.

In a similar vein to the Wolfenstein 3D games, Doom, and the Catacomb Fantasy Trilogy, the player's face was shown on the status bar, and was a visual reflection of the player's health, although instead of becoming bloodier, the skin wore away, leaving a skull when near death, and a darkened skull when dead.