PARRY NIGHTMARE

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Short 2D beat'em up action game against your own nightmare. Parry and swipe the foes off, and unravel the mystery. Fun gameplay, cute anime artwork on the cutscenes.
独特のパリィアクションで敵を一掃し、自身の悪夢から抜け出そう。短編ではあるがゲームプレイは大変シンプルで楽しく、絵も可愛いのでこの価格は普通にお買い得だと感じた。

Parry Nightmare is an extraordinarily short but very focused and polished bullet hell game about confronting thematic traumas manifesting themselves in the various nightmares of the protagonist.
Technical Issues and Performance
It took me roughly an hour to complete the story of Parry Nightmare. This includes four unique nightmares, which themselves can be as short as about five minutes each. During that time, I have not experienced any technical difficulties. The game ran perfectly fine, did not crash, feature any glitches, or otherwise.
Graphics and Sound
PN looks quite great. While the actual levels are kept fairly minimalistic, especially in the enemy design, the art style is unique and expressive. This is most notable in-between levels when the game switches back to Honno’s bedroom; as the night progresses, minor changes start happening that offer additional insight into her backstory and nicely add to the creeping, dreadful atmosphere towards the final level of the game.
Upon completing the game, the menu permanently changes into the daytime version, which I find to be a little disappointing as there is no way to revert to older rooms or thus to reread the story and the flavor text of the various decorations in it. 
The sound design is quite good as well, featuring a variety of different music genres that do exceptionally well at setting the atmosphere of each stage. The Childhood Trauma Nightmare in particular stands out as positive, managing to actively create a thoroughly creepy tone despite the cartoonish nature of the game due to a mix of both the boss design, the fact that levels start with hardly any illumination, and the ominous music. 
Story and Setting
The story takes place over a single night, progressing through four different nightmares that each provide small insights into the life of the protagonist. The narrative is almost entirely made up of internal monologue through Honno-chan, her alter-ego, which protects you from 'trauma', this game's enemies, during the nightmares. 
Ultimately, while very charming and focused on making a specific point about tackling issues surrounding depression, burnout, and similar, it never goes very in-depth, which, frankly, is appreciated. Instead, Parry Nightmare merely provides a very small glimpse into the life of the main character, and it does it exceptionally well for the very limited runtime of the game. 
A particularly nice aspect of the game’s writing is the dialogue with Honno-chan, which frequently clashes quite harshly with the depressive tone of the game by juxtaposing it with an alter ego that is seemingly exactly the opposite: aggressive, energetic, and charismatic, further supporting the superb character design of specifically her as the main character.
Gameplay
The gameplay loop between all four Nightmares is the same: you control a defenseless wisp that is protected by Honno-chan. In order for her to attack enemies, they need to approach you close enough for you to parry them; an unsuccessful parry, i.e., without an enemy immediately close to you, will still knock them back and put parrying on a brief cooldown. If an enemy is close enough, they are not just knocked back but also made vulnerable for Honno to attack them. The goal is to defeat enemies who then drop light as a resource, slowly illuminating the combat arena and ending the night upon reaching the set threshold. 
Naturally, there are some further caveats to this. For one, there is a small pool of enemy types, although they are also shared between the Nightmares. For example, bombs that are able to knock out Honno require the player to approach her to be able to continue combating enemies. Furthermore, there are boss enemies that are unique to their respective nightmares and have some small gimmicks to them. Especially the Childhood Nightmare stands out again, with it being the only boss effectively encouraging using sound cues to handle it. Its gimmick being two different types of charges towards the player marked by a slightly different sound. Since the arena early on is almost entirely dark, the player needs to pay active attention to dodge accordingly. 
Lastly, there is some minor decision-making to be done as Honno can receive various upgrades to her attack pattern, each of which also alters her portrait and personality slightly. These are a bit underwhelming, especially balance wise, as, at least in my experience, the meat upgrade felt actively worse than her basic form since it causes Honno to wander away from your wisp, causing enemies to be harder to control around yourself. Ultimately, however, the game is short and simple enough that these did not feel overly impactful. 
This is all to say that while gameplay merely consists of a single button to parry as well as your movement keys, the actual gameplay is fairly exciting due to the music and tension of the game quickly spiraling in difficulty if you accidentally fumble a parry and force yourself into the cooldown window. Here, the shorter runtime of the game helps keeping the experience tight and not growing stale over the course of a few more stages, though I would have preferred if there were a few additional enemy types or upgrades to engage with instead, since despite it being as tightly focused on simply telling the message it wants to tell by virtue of a handful of gameplay stages, it is still a rather thin experience for the asking price.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think Parry Nightmare is an enjoyable experience. It gets its point across very swiftly with a pretty decently engaging gameplay loop that nevertheless shows some minor issues in the lackluster balancing of the various upgrades and the fairly limited enemy types. The fact that the game manages to juggle its tone so skillfully between being fairly serious, whimsical, and energetic is quite impressive and might be worth the experience alone, though it is definitely not a game that one can really sink their teeth into. 
Acknowledgement
This game was provided for review purposes by the developers. Thank you!
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The art and music in this game are wonderful. While the theme is familiar (as far as recent comparisons, I'm reminded of NeverAwake), it's always a relatable one, and the execution here delivers it nicely. Lines such as "I feel most comfortable when I'm above average, but not excellent." were straightforward and effective. That's true of the simple gameplay as well, though I think it could've benefited from a dash button for just a bit more engagement. It would've made me feel less frustrated during the School Nightmare stage, which I found very annoying thanks to unlucky positioning. Still, I appreciate the game for being modest and priced accordingly.

Hidden gem
A short game with only 4 levels, but very intense! I've only played for 3 hours, but I feel like I played for 10!
The idea is simple: get close to enemies and hit "parry" to stun them, or knock their missiles back at them. Your helper, Honnou, will follow you and finish them off. Downed enemies drop light, and once you fill your light meter to 100 the nightmare (level) ends.
The fun is in maintaining your combo or streak. You're really powerful when you're doing well, but that can quickly change with one mistake. You need to parry a lot of times in a row to use a super move that allows you to defeat bosses. But miss a single parry and you've lost a big chunk of that meter. Honnou has 3 powerups:
Sushi makes her beam more powerful.
Vegetables gives her a sort of AoE that constantly damages enemies, but she moves very slowly.
Meat makes her constantly shoot fire, but she goes berserk and she runs all around the arena.
But if you let Honnou get hit by a single bomb-type enemy then she's knocked down and loses her powerup.
So it's really fun if you like the rush of keeping a perfect combo and timing parries. My heart was pounding each time I cleared a stage!

Full playthrough here (when it uploads):
it's pretty short, but pretty fun and my god the mama stage is so hard it's insane for me anyways a man with no timing or rhythm. The story was nice and even though the mechanics are simple as previously stated they add a pretty good amount of difficulty in some of the mobs hit boxes feel a bit weird, but it's manageable outside of the mama stage I'm glad they had a system to still progress to the next hour even if you fail.

Pretty fun take on the "bullet heaven" genre. Short and sweet with a weirdly severe difficulty spike on the last level. The core parry mechanic is really solid so I would've loved to see the gameplay around it get expanded more.
Very cute art and visual presentation. It's on the busy side so the screen can get hard to read during level climaxes, but you could argue that's just inherent to the genre. The well-implemented audio cues also make this less of an issue.
The highlight for me was the soundtrack, especially with Emi Evans(!) singing the ending theme. I'm hoping there will be a way to buy and download it if there isn't already. please release it in lossless format thanks

Very fun game! Music is great. The mechanics are very simple but game is still difficult enough to make it a challenge. Simple but straight forward story - very relatable with the various traumas it brings up.
Also I can fix her.