Reviews

The officially licensed game from the movie based on Clive Barker's novel - he also wrote the screenplay for it and directed it.

I did not see the movie, so I do not know whether the game adheres to the spirit of the original work or not. As a game in itself, however, Night Breed is a competently done, but not particularly original neither particularly involving maze/platform arcade with some hints of adventure. As the main character, Boone, you must explore the underground realm of the Night Breed, a race of sentient beings with shapeshifting abilities he belongs to, and perform various tasks which will enable you to fight the ultimate menace threatening the already precarious existence of the NB - the Mask.

Graphics are well defined and colorful, with some interesting effects like the flashes of lightning in the first stage. Sound on 128K is quite pleasing. The game is large and multi-loaded from tape, and it will take a fairly long time to be completed. It is not very challenging, so there's more quantity than quality here, but it should appeal to all those who like to mix exploration and combat.

I loved the movie Nightbreed when it appeared in 1990! Not only did it have a whole underground community of weird and wonderful monsters from the brain of weirdo Liverpudlian horror writer Clive Barker, but it basically portrayed them as the good guys, which made a nice change to having them preying on innocent victims and the like! So when a conversion of the film came out in game form on the good old Speccy, I knew I'd have to get my hands on it.....

You take control of Boon, the film's hero, as he trys to find the entrance to Midian, the underground lair of the Nightbreed, all the creatures us nasty humans have tagged with the collective term "monsters"! Believing himself to be responsible for a series of murders, Boon wants to be accepted into Midian to live among the other outcasts....

Boon is unaware that actually, the murders have been committed by his very own psychiatrist Doctor Decker! And to make matters worse, Decker has teamed up with a bunch of crazy neo-nazi style cops calling themselves The Sons of The Free, and they've all come to Midian too to destroy Boon and the Nightbreed! And to make things even worse-er-er, Boon's girlie Lori is also running around looking for Boon, unaware of all the weirdness.....

And so you wander around the game avoiding or shooting at the Sons Of The Free and various Nightbreed of the more stupid variety that can't tell the difference between you and the cops, and try to enter Midian...which you eventually do, and then you have to do other things which will reveal far too much about the plot of the film and/or game for me to go into here!

Anyway, it's a fairly tricky but decent enough romp through a pretty colourful maze of screens, with the baddies and yourself as monochrome sprites against the background... Various traps, pits and ladders are scattered around too for you to avoid or use, and you'll get three lives to do stuff with...which you can keep an eye on at the top of the screen, as your face slowly melts off the three skulls depending on how much damage you're taking.

All in all, not too bad...although if you're playing via cassette on the original Speccy, the multi-load can be a nightmare..and it also makes it pretty tricky to emulate too, unless you have a decent emulator that lets you rewind to certain parts of the cassette! And as I say, it can be fairly tricky and hard to see what's going on sometimes, but other than that it's quite a good conversion of the movie!

Atmospheric horror movie license with horror multiload and frightening difficulty level.
High vote just because I like the mood, but it's not so terribly playable.
3,75/5

edit: just watched the video walkthrough. It's one of the very rare games that gives you satisfying graphical sequences each time you accomplish an important task and when you finish the game. A certain effort has been put into the game.

Continuing with critics to recent reviews, this is a fair videogame but there are some flaws: big sprites appears with clash color, in an otherwise well polished background (and foreground, in a Jack the nipper II style). I mean, big sprites must prevail over the background, including its color.
Details are interesting, but it somehow suffers from lack of interest the more you play.
My subjective verdict: 3/5