Puppet Nightmares: A Small Browser Game With a Big Story

“A Piece of our Mind” has never been the part of Gamerzunite where we advertise, and I don’t plan on changing that now...

That said, there’s a game I’d really like to talk about, a game I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard of, a game that could really use some official form of advertisement or review because I’d like more people to know about it, a game that’s a lot better than it really needs to be: and that game is Puppet Nightmares.

It’s a free-to-play browser game, and you’ll notice I haven’t linked you to their website yet.  There’s a reason for that—it’s not a game for general audiences.  It’s designed for adults, more or less, and unapologetically doubles down on mature themes like sex, violence, abuse, pedophilia, innocence, the nature of the soul, religion, etc.  Given that’s the case, I don’t feel comfortable linking to it directly, but hey, you have Google and you know what it’s called, nothing’s stopping you from finding it yourself.



Anyway, it’s an RPG, and it’s largely single-player.  There are no graphics to speak of, it has no sound, the gameplay is simple, it’s over five years old, the community is tiny, the art is ok at best, and much of the game consists of grinding basic monsters for loot.  Yet, I’ve found myself unapologetically playing it non-stop for the past few days, preferring it to more detailed, pretty, or popular games, for two primary reasons...

The first, and less important reason, is that it’s one of the few free-to-play games that does money right.  Yes, there’s a premium in-game currency you can buy with real cash, but you can also earn it in-game, and at a fairly nice pace too: two days of playing and I was able to afford an update to my inventory space, which was more than a lot of other games will do for you.  It’ll take more than a few days of League of Legends to unlock a new Rune page, for example.

But that’s not really a reason to stay.  That’s a reason to be impressed by the game, not a reason to keep playing it.  No, what really got my attention and got me to keep playing was the story.  For a simple free-to-play browser game made by one person, this game’s story, plot, and characters are far better than they ought to be.  I’ve found exploring this world, meeting these characters, and completing their quests is a more satisfying experience in this game than in many others, including Skyrim or Destiny.

And the reason for that is really simple.  This is a game that doesn’t treat any of its characters as throwaways… Not so far, anyway.

For every NPC running a store or a service, there’s an option to talk to them, and reliably, every NPC has something different to say depending on what stage you’re at or what mission you’re on.  There’s no ‘generic’ answer when you use the talk option, each character’s relationship with the player and the world they live in evolve the more you play!  And when you have one of these NPC’s in your party with you as a guest, every other NPC in the world will react to them, and talk with them, and reveal story and character dynamics you may have never known otherwise.

It’s the kind of world-building detail that really elevates a game in my mind.  Yes, it’s a lot of extra effort, I understand why more games don’t do it, but then, I see this game—five years old, barely sustaining itself, run by a single guy—and he could put in the effort, so why can’t games with bigger budgets, more writers, more time do it themselves?  And furthermore, why isn’t this game rewarded more for the effort the creator put into this kind of writing?  By making the character seem a bit more alive, by giving them that extra push, I’ve really started to care about them.  The jerkass scarecrow, the over-the-top gay fashion store owner, the pirate mayor, the ambiguous messenger… I’m intimately familiar with their characters and their stories, and dammit, I care about them now.  Actually caring about a NPC is a rare thing to happen in a lot of games, and this one even has the good sense to not force you into it.  You’re never punished for not giving a crap about someone, there’s no karma or morality meter, if you want to be the world’s biggest dumbass to them, that’s your choice: but I’m nice to them because they’re unique and varied (except there’s a disproportionate number who endlessly mock and degrade you, that’s getting a wee bit old) and I want them to like me.



It’s amazing, at least for me, how much more I can tolerate in a game when I find myself more invested in the plot than the core ‘meat’ of the game.

And sure, maybe that’s a quality unique to me, and the number of people who will fight static images for 20 minutes just to get a piece of dialogue are few and far between, but it’s done its job so well I can’t help but love it.   Maybe it’s just especially validating for me.  I’m a writer, I enjoy the plot of games almost as much as I enjoy actually playing them, and in most every RPG I’ve ever played I made a habit of talking to my party members and shop keepers every opportunity, and I’ve been disappointed by the fact that generally , I get the same answer every time.  I kept doing it, because sooner or later they would say something new and occasionally I would be surprised, but it was a habit I was slowly losing.  There hadn’t been a game until now that actually rewarded me for my obsessive need to check what everyone had to say, and now that I’ve found one, I’m drawn to it like a moth to the flame.

It’s something I would obviously like to see in more games.  Maybe this article will help draw people’s attention to it.  Unlikely, but then, it’s more likely now than it was before I wrote the article, so, worth, I suppose. 

Oh, and there's a distinct lack of pictures in this article because, well... family website.  Not many family-friendly pictures of this game.  In a lot of ways I resent that, I feel like it would be a lot more popular if it weren't for some of its more unnecessary content.