Nightmare Kart

Sony’s legal department did the marketing for this one. For three years, Lilith Walther, known online as b0tster, and Corwyn Prichard built a Bloodborne kart racer in plain sight, growing an April Fools’ joke trailer into a full campaign with bosses, unlockables and split-screen. Then, weeks before launch, Sony objected. The pair stripped every trademark, renamed the city Miralodia, renamed the game Nightmare Kart, and shipped it anyway. The rebrand cost them a few months. It cost the game nothing that matters.

What you get is a combat kart racer in the lineage of Crash Team Racing and Diddy Kong Racing, wearing the low-poly, vertex-jittering skin of a 1998 PlayStation disc. You play a beast hunter dragged into a racing tournament nobody explains, piloting copper-and-steam contraptions through cobblestone streets slick with blood. There are 13 karts and 15 maps to unlock, a campaign punctuated by boss fights, battle and versus modes, and local co-op. On Steam it also carries 25 achievements and Remote Play Together support.

The price is zero. Not “free with a shop,” not “free until the expansion.” LWMedia charges nothing on itch.io or Steam, has announced a free expansion called The Old Karts, and states outright that no generative AI touched the project. In a market where the category leaders are a $60 first-party sequel and a remaster with microtransactions bolted on, that positioning is either naive or a statement. We read it as the latter.

The reception backs it up. Nightmare Kart sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, and the complaints that do surface are consistent: AI opponents with no sense of proportion and course lighting that sometimes hides the road. This review is about whether the handling, the atmosphere and the sheer volume of free content are enough to outrun those problems. On balance, they are — with caveats.

• Æther boost economy: Drifts and mid-air tricks charge a shared Æther meter that you spend on boosts. Chaining both without touching a wall is the entire skill ceiling, and it is a high one.
• Beast slaughter for speed: Roaming beasts populate each track. Kill them and your top speed climbs. Ignore them and a more bloodthirsty rival will out-pace you on the straights.
• Weaponized racing: Firearms, thrown ordnance and close-range shredders reduce opponents to scrap, not just “spin them out.” Contact matters.
• Campaign with boss fights: The tournament is interrupted by full boss encounters that reframe the story and break the race-after-race rhythm.
• 13 karts, 15 maps, battle and versus modes: A content list that would be respectable at $20.
• Local split-screen PvP and co-op, plus Remote Play Together on Steam: Couch multiplayer is a first-class feature, not an afterthought.
• Free, no generative AI, free expansion announced: The Old Karts is coming at no charge.

The Gameplay Loop

Every kart racer lives or dies on the drift, and Nightmare Kart’s drift is built to reward commitment. Initiate on approach, hold through the apex, and release for a boost proportional to how long you committed. So far, standard. The twist is that mid-air tricks charge the same Æther meter, so every ramp and every gap becomes a decision: land clean and keep speed, or twist in the air for a bigger pool to spend on the next straight. The two systems feed each other. A good lap is a rhythm of drift, jump, trick, land, boost, drift, and when it clicks the game plays closer to a rhythm title than a racer.

The beast mechanic is the clever part. Enemies wander the track, and slaughtering them raises your top speed for the race. This sounds like a gimmick until you realize it turns line choice into a strategic layer. The racing line and the killing line are rarely the same. Detour to cleave through a pack of beasts on lap one and you eat a two-second loss for a permanent speed advantage. Skip them, and you had better be flawless with your drifts. It is lap planning in the spirit of a Forza race with a damage model on, which is not a design one expects to find in a free PS1 homage.

Weapons complete the picture. This is combat racing where combat has consequences. A well-placed shot shreds a rival’s kart outright, and the game revels in it. The arsenal favors short-range brutality, so the fights happen in the pack, not from the back. Front-runners get punished when they get complacent, which is how it should be.

Balance and the AI Problem

Here is where the game shows its seams. The opponent AI has no consistent difficulty curve. Some races are built as processions, with the pack falling away by lap two. Then a race arrives where two rivals appear to have discovered a hidden gear, weapons land from impossible angles, and a single mistake means fourth. This is not rubber-banding in the Mario Kart sense, where the field stays close by design. It is the opposite: an AI that is either asleep or feral, and rarely in between.

This is the most common criticism in the Steam reviews, and it is a fair one. The fix is not exotic. Tighten the variance and give the mid-pack some teeth so the spikes stop feeling like a bug. LWMedia has an expansion on the roadmap, and this is the item that should top the patch notes ahead of new karts.

Campaign and Bosses

The campaign is where the Bloodborne inheritance becomes obvious, and it is where the game earns its atmosphere. Between tournament rounds, the story hands you boss encounters that swap the race format for something closer to an arena or a pursuit. They are not filler. Each one drops a piece of the story about why a hunter is racing in the first place, and the reveals land. The tonal confidence is remarkable for a two-person team. The bosses also work as pacing devices, breaking the monotony that kills most kart campaigns by hour three.

Modes and Multiplayer

Versus and battle modes cover the essentials, and local split-screen for both PvP and co-op is the headline. Kart racers are couch games, and LWMedia treats that as a design requirement rather than a legacy checkbox. Remote Play Together fills in for online play on Steam, with the usual caveat: the drift-trick timing is tight enough that any added streaming latency will be felt. There is no native netcode. For a free game from two people, that is a fair trade. For anyone hoping for ranked lobbies, it is a hard ceiling.

Onboarding

The game trusts you. There is no tutorial gauntlet, no unskippable explainer, and the Æther system is learned by watching the meter. Purists will love this. Newcomers to kart racers may need a race or two to understand why the AI is leaving them behind. A single optional practice track would have solved it.

The PS1 aesthetic here is not a filter slapped on a modern renderer. It is affine texture warping, vertex snapping, low-resolution dithering and fog deployed as deliberate art direction, and it is convincing enough to evoke memories of loading times that no longer exist. Miralodia’s gothic Victorian skyline reads as a lost PlayStation title from a studio that had the license and the budget, which is exactly the fantasy the developers were selling. The kart designs, all copper and steam, are among the strongest in the genre since Crash Team Racing’s remaster.

The same commitment to period accuracy causes the biggest usability problem. Several tracks are too dark. The fog and low-key lighting nail the mood but hide corners, and on the worst offenders a turn can arrive before you have seen it. This is form winning a war against function. A brightness slider, or a slightly cheatier ambient pass on the worst offenders, would preserve the atmosphere without costing you the road.

Performance is, by design, a non-issue. Geometry this simple is light on hardware, and the engine is doing far less work than the visuals suggest. A 2D-scope game in a low-poly wrapper should run comfortably on modest machines, and the art direction is built to guarantee it.

Nightmare Kart is Windows-only, distributed on Steam and itch.io. There is no macOS, Linux, iOS, Android or Switch build, and given the team size, do not expect one. Proton reports from Steam Deck owners are generally positive, but it is unofficial.

On Steam specifically, a controller is the correct input. The drift-trick chain relies on analog steering and a trigger you can feather, and a keyboard turns that into a binary on-off affair that flattens the skill ceiling. The game is playable on keyboard. It is not enjoyable on keyboard past the first cup.

The Steam build is the one to pick. It adds 25 achievements, Remote Play Together for remote couch sessions, and cloud sync for your unlocks. The itch.io version is the same game without those wrappers, useful mainly if you want to tip the developers directly.

Nightmare Kart is an unlikely thing to exist at all. A two-person team lost their title weeks before launch, rebuilt the branding under legal pressure, and still shipped a combat racer with core handling that many larger studios would envy. The Æther economy rewards precise drift-and-trick chaining, the beast mechanic adds a strategic layer the genre has lacked for years, and the campaign’s bosses give the whole thing a spine.

The flaws are real and consistent. The AI needs a balance pass, several tracks need a lighting fix, and the absence of native online play caps the competitive lifespan. None of them is structural. All of them are patchable, and LWMedia has already committed to a free expansion.

At zero dollars, the question is not whether it is worth the money. It is whether the handling and atmosphere outweigh the rough edges for a given player. We recommend it to the right audience — drift veterans, couch co-op households and PS1 nostalgics — while anyone expecting polished balance or online play should wait for the expansion.