Bloodborne-themed racing game Nightmare Kart can't be held down, not even by Sony and its mega-corporate hands. After the publisher forced solo developer Lilith "Bunlith" Walther this winter to rebrand the game formerly known as Bloodborne Kart, Walther had to push its release date to May 31.
Now, she's announced that her gothic low-poly racer has hit over 130,000 downloads on all platforms, proving yet again that the PS1 era will never truly finish for horror games.
The bleak '90s are inspiring a ton of popular new indies, including the survival game Crow Country and menacing puzzler Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. These games and Nightmare Kart all slather on gloomy PS1 horror elements like condiments - a little uncanny Resident Evil pixelation here, a drop of Silent Hill forced perspective there.
But the past few years of releases like Amnesia: The Bunker also establish that this aesthetic direction isn't a new trend - developers' interests in lo-fi horror have been slowly snowballing. In fact, Walther has helped establish the connection between modern spooky games and the PS1 back in 2021. Before her free-to-play Nightmare Kart took over Steam and Itch.io, she released a buzzy PS1-style Bloodborne demake.
"It's a tough balancing act to change designs to feel retro, while also staying true to the PS4 original," Walther told GamesRadar at the time, but her demake nonetheless successfully melts Bloodborne's detailed 2015 graphics into old-school grain and pain. Nightmare Kart, with its ridiculous combination of Mario zooming and Nightmare Creatures' grimy monsters, likewise nails the tense, but dreamlike atmosphere of lo-fi horror. It's not the 60 fps remake fans have spent anguished years waiting for, but it'll do.
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