Chaos Zero Nightmare (CZN) is an anime roguelike deck-building game coming out in a couple of weeks. It’s developed by Super Creative and published by Smilegate, which is also known for Epic Seven. This would also explain the art style and animation designs. In this article, we will delve into the game and cover its basics.
Chaos Zero Nightmare – What is it?
As mentioned earlier, Chaos Zero Nightmare is an anime, Roguelike, deck-building game. You will go through randomized missions called “Chaos Missions.” These missions will be the base of the Roguelike, where you gather cards to create a powerful deck that will help you in the run. Players form a team of three characters, each with cards that will be added to your deck during said run.
It will have turn-based combat. Players will draw cards from their deck and use abilities and combos to defeat enemies. This game is unique because of its “mental breakdown” mechanic, inspired by Darkest Dungeon. You must maintain mental care for your characters, or else they will suffer a breakdown. Players will have to balance their mental state and pressure on their characters before causing them to be unusable.
This mechanic will cause players to take a moment and pause before making a choice, or else they can render a character out for a while. Once stressed, during the run, their cards will turn into “bricked” cards, designed to be unusable. You will have to play 5 of them to snap them out of it. There will be various cards where you select them, and the character will deny the action or hit your team in the run.
Once you finally get done with a run, you will be saving the deck into a “save data.” While you will be fighting the mental breakdown, your main goal is to beat the bosses and get out of the run safely. If everyone dies, the run is over, and you will have to start over. This game will feature a 2D style in its turn-based mode, but will transition to a 3D animation style when using abilities and combos. If you have played Epic Seven before, you will recognize the animations.
Gacha System
I play gacha games, mainly Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero, and Wuthering Waves. I don’t condone all the new games coming out with gacha systems; it’s fun and it can be nice, but after a while, it feels like a cash grab. Gacha games, unfortunately, also come with power creep. Some developers like HoYo sometimes take care of the power creep, but it’s unavoidable.
With that being said, Chaos Zero Nightmare will be coming out with a gacha system, a system where you will be pulling for characters to enhance your playthroughs and your decks. They will all bring something to the team and to the gameplay through synergies. They will introduce a 50/50, meaning the featured character in the banners will drop, but you will also have a chance of getting a character not featured, but it will be guaranteed if the 50/50 is lost.
While it uses a standard 1% chance of getting five-star characters, the hard pity is lowered to 50 and isn’t reset for the Beginner banner, so if you get lucky, you can get more than one 5-star. There are additional special animations, but those are reserved for in-game currency, so no official payment is required for them.
Conclusion
I have seen a lot of this gameplay, and it looks interesting, with a lot of potential. It’s a try for me, as I will have to play it to get a feel for whether I will keep playing Chaos Zero Nightmare or not. I don’t play a lot of deckbuilders, and I haven’t sat down and played Slay the Spire (although I know I should), especially as a roguelike fanatic. I won’t have my fingers crossed for it and will have to give it a try when it’s released for Mobile and PC on October 22nd, 2025. Pre-registers are still open until release.
