A Nightmare before Christmas

It’s the night before Christmas Eve. Snowstorms and thunder are raging outside, but luckily you managed to get one of the last beds at the Inn of Dreams. Relieved, and looking forward to the presents in the morning, you drift off and begin to dream.

But hold on — this looks an awful lot like a nightmare. Dark forces have taken your friends, and it’s down to you alone to put things right. Something is going badly wrong here, though: after about ten minutes you wake up in the bedroom with a jolt and realize with relief that it was apparently only a bad dream.

You lie back, fall asleep again, and land — yes, exactly — right back in the same nightmare. Will you manage it this time: defeat the dark forces and rescue your friends before time runs out for good?

What to expect

A chilling loop concept: a relentless time mechanic that hurls you back to the start every ten minutes.
Thrills and jump scares: not for the faint of heart — face the dark forces in the dream.
Memory tactics: keep a cool head through the scares. What you learn in earlier loops is your key to success.
Completely different puzzles: the same set, but an entirely new puzzle experience compared to A Christmas Dream.

On the order of play: both experiences take place in the same room. If you want to play both, we’d suggest starting with A Christmas Dream — though you certainly don’t have to.

How it came about

We were constantly asked: “Do you have anything scary, anything horror?” Our answer was always a firm no — horror really isn’t our thing, we’re much more the humor type. But as Halloween rolled around yet again and the requests piled up, a mad idea occurred to us: why not make the Christmas room just a little bit spooky?

Then again, it would have been a shame if you could no longer experience it afterward in its familiar world of cozy Christmas nostalgia, just because the puzzles stayed the same. So that settled it — an entirely new concept was needed.

Klaus-Günther, our skeletal friend, was still sitting in the corner anyway. His last big appearance had been as a mummified skeleton in the video trailer for our puzzle table — now he could finally take a leading role.

A bit of decor, a dash of suspense, and a handful of completely new puzzles later, the room was born. We finished, as it happens, right on the stroke of Halloween night. Ever since, this version has been spreading cheerful terror among our guests — and we’re still surprised every time by how brilliantly the concept lands, even though it always felt a bit like our unloved stepchild.