Nightmare Frames finds the horror in 1980s Hollywood

polygon.com:

It takes me an hour of playing Nightmare Frames to fully rekindle my love-hate relationship with Los Angeles.

The new point-and-click adventure from Postmodern Adventures is a playful, big-hearted homage to Hollywood horror, touching on everything from the art of old-school prosthetics to classic Hammer Film productions that still haunt pop culture today. There’s the city itself, my former home, a sprawling, sun-bleached character that needs no introduction. Pixelated scenes of sleazy photographer studios and pawn shops hit like a punch in the gut, reminding me of the life I left behind, my old driving routes, and bone-dry sunsets that I watched while stuck in traffic. Most of all, my gut recognizes exactly how the game’s protagonist, Alan Goldberg, is an impossibly LA-flavored piece of shit. It’s a lot.

Nightmare Frames is set in 1985, amid the action blockbuster wave that gave us Terminator and Rambo. Alan is a screenwriter, best known for schlocky horror flicks instead of “meaningful” dramas like Melodies From Heaven, his sole prestige film that got an Oscar nomination. His most famous work is the popular slasher movie Lunatic, and fans compare its eponymous villain to iconic killers like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger.

All in all, Alan has it pretty good for a working movie writer — especially one who sees television writing as a lesser craft, even when directors like William Friedkin were doing incredibly gripping work on The Twilight Zone — but naturally, he wants more. When he gets offered a powerful favor in exchange for finding a rare lost film by the psychopathic director Edward Keller, the horror vibes go from Scream to Shadow of the Vampire.

With some (not all!) contemporary point-and-clicks, the first