Darkest Dungeon meets anime in Chaos Zero Nightmare

An unexpected combo from Smilegate

Marco Wutz | Nov 6, 2024

Smilegate

Smilegate has released a brand-new trailer for Chaos Zero Nightmare, its upcoming turn-based RPG, and it fuses the grimdark tone and visuals of Darkest Dungeon with anime characters.

Set in a nightmarish, post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, Chaos Zero Nightmare is a gacha game that features a turn- and card-based combat system. Players create parties from three characters, all of which come with five unique attack and skill cards making up your deck.

Similarities to Darkest Dungeon not only exist in terms of aesthetics – a sanity system not unlike the one present in the popular roguelike game seems to be in place. Characters are represented as chibi-style figures in combat itself, reminiscent of Reverse: 1999, though animations for what looks like ultimate attacks follow a more traditional 2D anime style.

Chaos Zero Nightmare seems to be unusually dark for a gacha game, with the trailer showing a couple of brutal kill animations and cutscene snippets. You can check it out for yourself below:

Chaos Zero Nightmare does not have a release date yet and will likely come to PC, iOS, and Android as a free-to-play title.

Published Nov 6, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg