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2. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
After the success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it was only a matter of time before we got a newer take on the Frankenstein tale. The latter also had a series of video game adaptations. The SNES and Genesis ones were pretty straightforward adventure games.
The Sega CD version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though…wow. In all honesty, this may be one of the strangest video games ever made, both in terms of the medium and as an adaptation. Although its foundation is a point-and-click adventure, every now and then, it transforms into a fighting game. You play as the monster, trying to spam your rushing attack, when taking on such bosses as a dog, a wolf, a landlord, a sewer guard, and so on.
This includes when the monster accosts Elizabeth, as Frankenstein’s wife busts out kung fu acrobatics before being beaten to death. Rather than her reanimated self committing suicide, followed by Victor Frankenstein dying of illness and the monster mourning him, we instead see the monster and Victor have a final fight on a boat, followed by the monster and his new bride setting fire to it before wandering off together into the Arctic.
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1. Nightmare on Elm Street: Keep Her Awake
Initially, when tasked with coming up with a Nightmare on Elm Street entry for this list, I was just going to go with the 1989 DOS game loosely based on Dream Warriors. Then I went down the rabbit hole and found an obscure game from 2010 whose controversial past has turned it into lost media. To hype up the ill-fated movie reboot, the studio licensed a flash game using live action footage called Keep Her Awake.
Centered around the horrifying and inevitable nature of having to face Freddy, you watch a teenage girl in her room as she tries to fight the biological need for sleep. The longer you stay awake, the higher your score. Sounds like a good idea, right? The problem came from the different ways you could have the girl stay awake. There were options like cold showers, exercise, ingesting stimulants, and the ever-so-fun idea of…self-mutilation. Oof.
Nine, ten, don’t expect to find a copy of this game again.
