Little Nemo is a Fun-Filled Platformer Inspired by the Comic

You may be too young to be familiar with the Little Nemo comic, movie, or even the NES video game, but that’s okay because Nemo and his pals are coming back to play.

To give you a little bit of history, Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends is a hand-drawn platformer inspired by and set in the style of the comic strip that ran in newspapers starting way back in 1905.

The original comic featured fantastical characters and plots that often had to do with Nemo dreaming his way into outlandish situations, but no matter what happened, Nemo would always awake in or out of his bed.

These comics then went on to inspire the 1989 anime, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland and a unique colorful side-scrolling platformer for the NES called Little Nemo: The Dream Master that came out in 1990. Both saw Nemo taking off on adventures in his dreams in order to defeat the evil Nightmare King and rescue Slumberland from the nightmares forever.

Fans have gone on to put together collections of comics based on the franchise, including a limited release book of many different styles of renditions of the pajama-clad dreamer in 2014, called Dream Another Dream.

Additionally, IDW comics released a new series called Return to Slumberland that same year that featured a reluctant child who didn’t want to go back to Slumberland.

Finally, skip ahead to 2021 and this new version of the beloved series is under development for PC, Mac, and Linux. Featuring four very different characters: the brave Nemo, the magic-wielding Princess, the mischievous clown Flip, and the agile royal guard Peony, each character offers a different move set and weapon to take on enemies with.

This new take on his classic adventures takes players to all kinds of whimsical environments, ranging from The Night Sky, which has sneezing clouds that can attack you, to The Mushroom Forest, where Nemo and the other characters will encounter larger-than-life giants and vicious clowns.

Each one of these areas looks fantastic and brings the action from the strips to life in new ways. The hand-drawn environments and characters are also punctuated by sharp lines akin to the original source, which is now in the public domain.

If it looks like this game is designed with a lot of love and care, that’s because it is. Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends is a dream project for the creative director, Chris Totten. He is a fan of the original NES game and went on to form a team in order to work together to bring Little Nemo’s follies to life.

I can’t wait to see what the team ends up creating out of this beloved franchise, but you can help shape the course of its development by checking out their Kickstarter campaign, which goes live in just a few weeks. Visit their website for updates about the campaign as it goes live, follow them on Twitter, and check out their press kit for screens and other info about the game.