Nintendo Switch Critic Reviews

Nightmare Boy pays homage to classic 16 bit platform games. It´s colorful, well animated and fun to play, although you can finish the game in less than four hours.

Nightmare Boy is halfway between both, excellent in some aspects and frustrating in others. Nevertheless, it is a challenging metroidvania game with a memorable design that demonstrates the good state of Spanish video game development.

In the end Nightmare Boy offers up something thoroughly different from a visual standpoint and can be quite challenging, just not always for the right reasons. If you give it some time it does pick up momentum and you can get into a groove but when you hit the spots where you’re not sure where you’re going, things understandably drag quite a bit. Probably only recommended for the most die-hard Metroidvania fans who have blown through what’s already available on the system, show patience with Nightmare Boy and some fun can be had with it.

Nightmare Boy throws a whole heap of platform-adventure ideas at the wall, but only a few of them manage to stick. It's a Metroidvania with a distinctive style all of its own, but there are some glaring issues with its narrative, controls, pacing and performance. If you're after something completely different in the platformer category and have a high frustration threshold, however, there's a certain amount of quirky fun to be had here.

Nightmare Boy, while stylistically interesting and unique, amounts to little more than a frustrating take on the Metroidvania genre in the long run. Its inconsistent difficulty curve means it's too hard to be entry level at times, while also being too easy to be anything else. Along with the inability to play with a Pro Controller while the Switch is docked, Nightmare Boy comes out as a messy Metroidvania at best.