Puppet Nightmares, formerly Pocket Nightmares, is a web game made by Ignis in January of 2008. An evil toy maker is luring children into a nightmare filled world, to manipulate their souls and rob them of their innocence. Only you can collect and unlock the powerful Soul Puppets, also formerly Pocket Nightmares, that are needed to stop his madness.
The game is filled to the brim with fantastic art, fun gameplay, and lovable characters.
Tropes used in Puppet Nightmares include:
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: One of Keli's side-quests rewards in a rare, non-wearable clothes reward. In the form of her thong.
- Bonus Boss: With the reward being more Soul Puppets for defeating them.
- Big Bad: The Toymaker
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Without spending credit, players can't have any more than one full party of monsters (and two spares). If they're fully equipped, there's not even room for looted equipment.
- The equipment crafting system is also rife with this; even if the equipment creation doesn't fail, there's no guarantee it won't be complete trash. Unless you get the right items from the Credit Shop, of course.
- Besides buying, credit can be gained by voting for the game on popularity lists and winning fights, but it's a slow process, averaging out to 10 or 15 credit per day.
- Catgirl: The Neko, obviously.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The different tiers of Soul Puppets manifest in different colors.
- Continuing Is Painful: Continuing after getting a game over results in losing all non-permanent equipment, consumable items, marbles, and a large amount of coins.
- Cute and Psycho: Eva, the credit shop clerk.
- Cute Monster Girl: Over half of the obtainable Soul Puppets fall into this trope.
- Dem Bones: Two separate types of skeleton enemies, as well as Pierce Bones.
- Disk One Nuke: The first four Soul Puppets you can get can easily be molded into this.
- Easy Mode Mockery: At the difficulty selection screen, the picture for the Easy difficulty shows several Soul Puppets descending from a rainbow.
- Fate Worse Than Death: If you game over, you lose your soul and get trapped in the miniature game world forever, slowly losing your memories, becoming a soulless husk in the real world.
- Fan Disservice: Yeah, you know that Cute Monster Girl on your team? The one with her cleavage showing? Oh, and the sexy, seductive Keli? Yeah, both of them are about ten inches tall, and the one in your team is about as smart as your dog. Sorry.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: Eva, Pierce, and Orion do this when they get significantly angry.
- Horny Devils: There's a Succubus monster, but she just amounts to an archer who happens to wear prostitute clothes. The Lamia is a much straighter example.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Keli is a magic teaching, valley girl talking, sexy young lady who likes to spend her time hanging in her own grave "putting missionaries in their position."
- Sweet Tooth: Neko are unlocked by acquiring 150 Chocolate Mice.
- Taken for Granite: The crafting NPC Orion is stuck as a statue. It's assumed around the NPCs that the Toy Maker did it as punishment for his extreme perverted tendencies.
- The Alcoholic: The Peddler
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Great and superb rank monsters are supposed to be extremely rare for the players, yet it seems that two-thirds of the enemies in the later parts of Episode 2 have these quality levels.
- Depending on the area, monsters have chances to cause status effects on attacking. In the aforementioned later areas, the chance can go up to 30%; for perspective, players would have to be very lucky, rich, or devoted to crafting to get as much as 25%.
- The Speechless: Popin, the resident egg painting, zombified rabbit has no lower jaw, so he speaks through actions, and painted bark.