Nightmare Kart Dev Talks About How Its Racing Design Blends With Soulslike Bosses

Highlights

Nightmare Kart offers 3-4 Souls-like bosses with old school health bars in arena-type environments, keeping players engaged in the action.
Creator Lilith Walther wanted to maintain Souls-like elements in boss fights, even though the game is a kart racer, striking a balance.
While Nightmare Kart’s difficulty spike is lower than traditional Souls games, one boss is challenging enough to make players spend hours grinding through it.

Even though there is no sign of Bloodborne making its journey to PC or even a sniff of a sequel, it’s all fine as Nightmare Kart, a Soulslike kart racing game inspired by the FromSoftware title, is on its way. Creator Lilith Walther, who is behind the PlayStation-style demake, originally called the game Bloodborne Kart but had to ditch the Bloodborne concept after Sony sent a letter requesting they scrub the branding.

Now, as Nightmare Kart makes its way to Steam and Itchio for free on May 31, Walther sat down to talk about how the bosses in the game fit into the difficulty of the Soulslike genre whilst still being a racing title.

Nightmare Kart Creator Wasn’t “Glad” About Changes To Bloodborne Racer

But undertaking the rebranding was still “a good time”.

Boss Fights in Nightmare Kart

Speaking with GantRant, Lilith Walther revealed that there would be 3–4 bosses in Nightmare Kart and that it would also feature a campaign mode. Like most boss fights in games, Nightmare Kart is no different and will include a long old school health bar at the bottom of players’ screens as the action gets going in an arena-type environment. Once completed, players then move onto the next campaign mode. “Making sure the boss fights lived up to Souls expectations,” said Walther, which highlights how much thought and development has gone into this particular area of the game’s makeup.

Due to Nightmare Kart naturally being a racing game, as the name suggests, incorporating a Soulslike genre when it comes to bosses sounds like it could be a tricky endeavor to undertake, but Walther insists that they wanted to make sure there was a separation between these two concepts when it comes to Bloodborne design themes. “Oh yeah, they’re easier–it is a Kart Racer, right? I do want it to be Soulsy, as Soulsy as a Kart Racer can be, but at the end of the day, this is a Kart Racer and not a Soulslike game. There are design sensibilities I wanted to stick to.”

An element not included in Bloodborne is mid-boss checkpoints and, since boss fights are multiphased in their design, Walther didn’t see the point in making players partake in chases all over again. Unlike most Soulslike games, Nightmare Kart’s difficulty spike is much lower than players coming from that particular genre would be used to.

However, there is apparently one boss that is a bit tougher than others. Without spoiling what boss they are referring to, Walther stated, “That one is definitely up there in Souls boss difficulty. Maybe not like Final Souls boss, but definitely a difficult one. I watched some playtesters spend an hour grinding through it again, and that felt like getting super invested in a Souls boss.”