Update []:
The Kickstarter for the HD revival of Nightmare Busters is now live and has already reached its €60,000 goal in just one day.
As part of the Kickstarter, Pix'n Love Games is offering various tiers for potential players to back, with the cheapest option being a €30 digital deluxe edition containing Nightmare Busters Rebirth on any of the following platforms (Steam, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PS4, PS5 or Xbox Series), a digital OST, your name in the credits, access to a special Discord channel, and a bunch of digital wallpapers.
This is listed alongside a €45 physical option for Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PS4, or PS5 (featuring all of the extras listed above and a keyring featuring Flynn and access ), as well as a €70 collector's edition (which adds the soundtrack on CD, acrylic standees, a 32-page art book, and more).
According to the Kickstarter campaign, there's also a separate option to get your hands on the SNES Ultimate Edition — an updated version of the original SNES game on a cartridge featuring bug fixes and new game modes.
This can be bought individually for €70 or as part of a complete edition for €200 (with the new game and a bunch of merch thrown in). The SNES game is currently expected to ship at the end of this year, while Rebirth is scheduled for release in 2026.
Here's the link to the Kickstarter.
Original Story: If you cast your mind back to April 2021, you may vaguely remember reading the news that Pix'n Love and Aurora Game Studio were working on a revival of the SNES title Nightmare Busters for PC and consoles.
At the time, the two companies shared a bunch of pre-production screenshots of the project, as well as a number of potential features including redone graphics, level design, music, and UI, in addition to a two-player mode, an additional option for speedrunners, and much, much more. However, nothing ever really seemed to come of the project, with the game pretty much dropping off the map in the years since, except for a rare demo showing at Animasia, a French festival celebrating Asian culture in 2023.
Well, it appears that now, after years of pretty much no news about the project, there's finally been some movement with the remake, with the two companies publishing a new reveal teaser earlier this year and issuing some new PR yesterday reannouncing the title. Admittedly, this trailer is pretty bare bones simply showing the lead character walking across a fairly barren landscape and dispatching a single enemy, so it likely won't get anyone too excited. But it's encouraging at least to hear it hasn't been abandoned.
As for the statement, again, there's a lot of important information left out, including which specific platforms it will be coming to, but it seems to suggest that the game will finally be released later this year, claiming that "2025 will be the year of Nightmare Busters!"
It also gives a little bit more insight into what's been taking so long behind the scenes, suggesting that development on the project only began in earnest two years ago.
Nightmare Busters, in case you've never heard of it, is an SNES run 'n gun shooter from the London-based developer Arcade Zone, which was initially developed in 1994 but wasn't commercially released for the console until December 2013. It focuses on a pair of leprechauns called Flynn and Floyd as they embark on a journey to stop an evil fiend called Tyrant who is spreading nightmares throughout the land.
Here's a longplay of the original game, for comparison: