Sometime in a distant, far-off future lies nothing but Chaos—an all-encompassing threat that has consumed much of humanity and forced what was left into giant space cruisers that soar through the stars to stay alive. Nothing is certain, all is Chaos. And look, as much as I’d like to spam the word Chaos, it’s not exactly sunshine and roses for the denizens within the world of developer Super Creative and publisher Smilegate’s newest roguelike deckbuilding dungeon crawling role-playing game title ‘Chaos Zero Nightmare’ (“CZN”). Stress plays a big factor in setting apart what this game does, because seeing horribly disfigured monsters can be terrifying and not to mention watching people die in front of you.
Chaos Zero Nightmare is a free-to-play gacha game that launch late October across Windows-based PCs, Android, and iOS devices. I wasn’t really expecting to delve into the game myself when I first reported on its launch, but I got a bit curious and (after dropping a few other mobile titles) I jumped in expecting to lump it in with the rest of the abandoned gacha titles in my repertoire. However, I ran into big of a snag on that front—I wasn’t expecting to CZN this much, never mind finding the game to be addicting.
Because I think it’s only fair to review a gacha game after a full month’s cycle, have a gander below to see what got this game to pull me away from the other games I was supposed to be reviewing.
In CZN, players take on the role of Captain of the S.S. Nightmare, one of those aforementioned giant vessels that house countless lives within it who are just trying to live life to the fullest. More notably, you are a Protos, someone who is capable of delving into the Chaos along with a group of combatants to fend off the approaching darkness and, just maybe, find salvation from this growing pestilence. The Chaos located on Earth is known as “The Blue Pot” and the game quickly tosses us into the fray with our first bout with the miasma with a small team of Nightmare’s finest combatants so we can get an idea of how the game plays all the while witnessing just how dangerous the Chaos can be.
This is a deckbuilding dungeon crawler where the player will attack and debuff enemies while also tending to their wounds through the cards present in their decks. You will draw a set of five cards (give or take) every turn and deploy the necessary countermeasures against baddies all the while adhering to your available Action Points. All your available cards are based on the characters you bring into the fray (along with their Save Data, but I’ll touch on that in a moment) and, depending on your build, you can absolutely put the Chaos through the works. For example, some enemies can spam your hand with garbage cards, but the right build allows you to use those junk cards to retaliate without harming the good cards on hand for massive damage. Once you’ve got a groove going (and it doesn’t take long to do so), CZN ends up being a lot of fun.
Now, you can’t just go swinging all willy-nilly as not only will you have to watch out for enemies retaliating or going up against bosses with specific bonus criteria available only to them. Because there’s another aspect to your team’s health that matters significantly: stress!
Whether your on the offensive or taking a beating, a teammate is liable to be building up their stress meter. If that meter fills up completely, the combatant becomes incapacitated which significantly reduces your health pool and any cards of theirs that would fill your hand will instead be their “trauma” so to speak. By clearing out these cards from your hands as fast as possible, you can get your combatant to break free and follow up with a free ultimate attack. But enemies will use this moment of weakness to their advantage and you may just end up finding a run of yours ending abruptly just as things can be turned around.
(Super Creative/Smilegate)
CZN can be a tough game, at least when I compare it to the few gacha games I’ve played recently. You can expect for a run to quickly go south thanks to bad hands or the aforementioned stress system. The dungeon crawling meshes quite well with the roguelike nature of the game, however, which makes exploring the Chaos rather addicting. Whether you complete a run or fail, a Save Data will be created for your playable characters which enhances their strength based on the cards, equipment, or special events you’ve found in your runs. These data files are important as you’ll need the enhanced strength to farm for leveling and Memory Fragment materials to further strengthen your characters and to take on greater challenges.
Being its selling point, CZN’s world is as beautifully animated as it is bloody bleak. Character sprites are well-made and plenty bouncy, accompanied by brief but really cool anime cutscenes depending on the kind of attack that gets fired out. The Chaos is demonstrated to be this terrifying presence, warping everything it touches into a monstrosity of sorts and that is reflected really well when flying eyeballs stretch out limbs or necrotic piles of flesh pops out of thin air. The art direction perfectly encapsulates what a giant city in space looks like, the quiet and calm moments are relaxing against a tense atmosphere of tragedy, and combat is violently flashy with blood and guts coming out of your foes.
(Super Creative/Smilegate)
Right, so when we’re not busy being a Protos, we still have ship captain duties to attend to. Everything you do aboard the S.S. Nightmare will help you out in your future delves into the Chaos. At the main hub, you have your story missions, simulation missions for character materials, and the Ark City with the countless lives that exist aboard your ship. Here, you can manage a policy system that has you signing off on paperwork to fill respective meters before the deadline comes to pass. And while you wait for the paperwork to pile in, you can stop by for a meal for boosts to your team’s statuses, grab a coffee to refill stamina (used for the simulation missions), or take a moment to relax and have a chat with one of the cast members out in the city. By hanging out with them and giving them gifts, you can level up your relationships with them which gets you to learn more about them, nets you some small stat boosts, and also an animated wallpaper for your main hub.
There is also the infirmary, a place where broken combatants end up if you are unable to successfully free them from the binds that is stress. Essentially, if you complete a Chaos exploration mission (be it in success or complete failure) and a character falls into a state of trauma, you’ll have to come here to give therapy lest you never want that unit to be playable again. I’m no therapist (I probably need one) and I’m sure you aren’t either, so all you need to do here is choose the best possible option to be as empathetic as possible to someone freaking out over the horrors they’ve seen. The dialogue here can be a bit stressful as characters will be screaming out in pain, but thankfully it doesn’t last too long and you get to see another side of the cast that you otherwise wouldn’t in the story.
On the flip side, there are currency rewards for seeing where all the options go, which I found a little… Odd, as it almost seems to “gamify” trauma (though ultimately, I don’t think that was the intention). But seeing as you’ll find your characters here often, depending on your luck, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to explore the other therapy choices.
(Super Creative/Smilegate)
Reading the main story is required to be able to open up new Chaos zones and other gameplay mechanics. Here, you have two options within this mode: the story itself, which is told through majority-voiced visual novel segments and missions, which are required combat sequences to advance the story (this is where those Saved Data files would be very helpful!). I quite like the story so far, not only because the world of CZN is fairly unique but also because the story chapters themselves have bespoke Chaos missions that feature unique events as you explore them. The Japanese voice cast is excellent and the characters so far have their own motivations sorted out alongside the burning desire to drive away the Chaos—but past traumas make achieving that singular goal much more difficult than it has to be. We’re only human, after all.
This being a live service game, I’ll need quite a few chapters to really decide on how I feel about the story. But I like the direction the narrative is headed and characters like Lenoa and Yuki are interesting to follow along with. I found that CZN does a great job of making sure that its gameplay meshes well with its narrative, and beneath the eye-catching clothing lies character stories worth checking out.
Speaking of live service games, I also need to entail the sort of monetisation model Chaos Zero Nightmare employs. This is a free-to-play gacha game where players “pull” for a chance to get new playable characters and “Partners” that enhance certain properties of a character’s class. You can pull for either of these by playing the game, completing limited-time events and story missions as they come. Or, you can pay for pulls, either by singles or tens, for roughly 20-25 USD based on my napkin maths. If you’re familiar with the way gacha games work, you’ll be right at home. Especially if you’ve played any HoYoverse-made game as CZN features identical progression systems such as the way dailies work, the way the battle pass is structured, Memory Fragments (basically artefacts), so on and so forth.
(Super Creative/Smilegate)
If you’re not familiar with how gacha games work, I’d be cautious if you believe yourself to be a reckless spender—it is very easy easy to end up spending money you don’t have. Personally, I ran through a whole month of the game without spending a single cent and I’ve gotten most of the characters that I want. CZN has a good currency economy and so long as you save your earned pulls and spend wisely, you’ll be able to get the units you want over time. That is the nature of the gacha beast: your time in exchange for more content. Which also means aligning your gaming schedule to fit in time to play CZN for maximum reward potential.
Now unfortunately, this sort of monetisation model ultimately does end up impacting the sort of builds you can create. You can only work with what you have after all and you’ll often find that some build compositions will only really be effective if you have those particular units. This is a fundamental flaw with character gacha-based games and while the roguelike nature of CZN mitigates that a bit, you will be forced to pull for new characters whether you want to or not.
(Super Creative/Smilegate)
Chaos Zero Nightmare shouldn’t be this addicting, but I spent a lot of time crawling through the Chaos over the last month. There’s a fair bit of content to trawl through and the bleakness of the world contrasted with the colour anime aesthetics is very interesting, which has kept me engaged with the story thus far. It’s not easy to wrest me away from my other actively played gacha games, but CZN has done it and I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys sauntering through gloomy deckbuilding dungeon crawlers. ∎
Chaos Zero Nightmare
Played on
Windows PC, Android-based Devices
PROS
- Addicting roguelike deckbuilding combat.
- Decent build variety.
- Narrative is both interesting and meshes with gameplay well.
- Great art style and animations.
CONS
- Builds are held back by the gacha system.
- STOVE PC client is annoyingly unstable.
