My Dream Ride Is a Nightmare Kart

Nate Schmidt, Managing Editor

FromSoft games have always been funny, as long as you’re willing to laugh at yourself. Well, I don’t know about King’s Field. Maybe King’s Field wasn’t funny. But Dark Souls is hilarious—that skeleton that drops the exploding barrel on you as you run up the stairs? You know the one I mean. I didn’t necessarily chuckle the first time it happened, but now I look forward to that moment as I would anticipate the arrival of an old friend. General Radahn’s tiny horse? I mean, come on. They put their most colossal guy, a warrior strong enough to stop the stars in their tracks, on this goofy little tiny horse! (Yes, there is actually really sweet lore about the horse, but it’s still very funny to look at.)  

Bloodborne is the FromSoft game I never really saw the humor in. The monsters are a little too haggard, the story a little too raw. There are a couple slapstick moments in Bloodborne, like that giant fireball that blows across the bridge and decimates everyone in its path on the way to the Father Gascoigne fight, but you can see the fire coming from pretty far away, so it’s not surprising enough to be funny. I have learned since if you want to appreciate the humor in Bloodborne, you need to play Nightmare Kart, a game that started out as a joke, but is so much more than a goofy riff on the haunting theme that Bloodborne set down. It’s a genre-bucking roller coaster that’s also an exercise in pointing out—with love!—that one of the most self-serious “soulsborne” games is also one of the silliest.

You might say this game taught me to race with more insight. Screenshot by the author.

Developer Lilith Walther already had experience turning Bloodborne into something different with her PS1 “demake” of the original title, which harnessed the power of retro graphics and music to make Bloodborne feel like a classic from a different era in gaming. Nightmare Kart still employs the retro art style from the demake, reminding me less of Mario Kart 64 and more of a hybrid between Crash Nitro Kart and Twisted Metal Black. Because it became necessary over the course of development to rebrand the game that was originally going to be called Bloodborne Kart, Walther developed a number of legally distinct characters that, by virtue of gentle parody, actually make for a more fun take on Bloodborne than a straightforward adaptation of the original would have been: consider racing against “Herman” in his wheelchair, facing down the shapeshifting boss “Father Gregory,” and racing to capture “Nicolas,” a character who wears a suspiciously familiar cage on his head (in Nightmare Kart, that cage also contains a little yellow bird).

Nightmare Kart was already such a fun and endearing concept that it could have just been released as a quick demo and still been really entertaining, but here’s the thing: even if every one of the references in the last paragraph went right over your head, Nightmare Kart is an amazing retro kart racer. The story mode could have just been a series of tracks and visual gags that make the savvy player nod their head and say, “Aha, yes, that’s a funny Bloodborne reference,” but this game has arena battles and unique items and boss fights. Mario Kart 8 doesn’t have boss fights! The fights are pretty phenomenal, too, drawing inspiration from some notoriously difficult parts of another game that might appear a little familiar; I had to throw myself against Father Gregory several times before I managed to take him down. There is so much creativity packed into this relatively brief game that I often feel as if I am playing a long-lost classic that actually came out before the original Bloodborne.

Father Gregory is cooler than you. Screenshot by the author.

I don’t exactly know what word I would use for the opposite of retrofuturism, because future retroism is far too ugly a turn of phrase. But there is something really delightful in Nightmare Kart’s invocation of the golden age of kart racers combined with the most Gothic aesthetic imaginable, as if you could make jet black coffee improbably delicious by topping it with confetti sprinkles and whipped cream. Also, in a genuinely magnanimous act, Walther released this game for free on Steam, although we recommend checking out the pay-what-you-want edition over on itch.io. I might never get a Bloodborne 2, or even a Bloodborne remake, and I’m learning to be okay with that. I’m learning, instead, to drive the nightmare.

Published 8/1/2024.