Little Nemo: The Dream Master | SuperPod Game Club

Sorry for the delay, but November 2025's Game Club review is finally here! The game of the month from then was Little Nemo: The Dream Master for NES. Based on an animated film from the time, which itself was based on a comic strip, the player controls Nemo who's on a quest to rescue King Morpheus from the evil Nightmare King.

Go ahead and read and see what we had to say about it!

Thrak

This is an NES game made by Capcom. Sounds great on paper but ultimately it falls below expectations for me. Positives are the game is gorgeous and has some decent level design but this game is way way way too difficult. Some of the worst enemy placement imaginable coupled with the whole mechanic of taking over the animals for powers which is nice, but also is rough around the edges, like why can't I defend myself with all of them? It's a neat idea but it falls flat for me. Not a terrible NES game though.

Tony

In Little Nemo: The Dream Master you play as Nemo, a young lad who was pulled into dream land to help save the King of Slumberland from the evil Nightmare King. Throughout the journey you use candy to befriend various animals and use their abilities to traverse each level and collect hidden keys to unlock the exit. The levels start off pretty simple at first, with fairly linear layouts and the keys being placed in fairly obvious spots, but some of the later levels can get more complicated in design to almost an annoying degree. I think Nemo’s House was one of the levels that frustrated me the most, since it’s fairly long compared to the other and doesn’t have any checkpoints, so dying means you have to do everything all over again. Then there’s the first part of level 8-2, which has fire traps with terrible hit detection that became the bane of my very existence. I spent more time trying to get past that single area than I’d like to admit and it’s the only part of the game that I would consider to be completely unfair.

Little Nemo: The Dream Master is a game that I have a lot of nostalgia for. I remember receiving the game as a gift for either my birthday or Christmas way back in 1990 and staying up way past my bedtime with my sister and watching her beat it. Even with some of its glaring flaws, I can’t help finding the game to be completely charming. A lot of it probably comes down to nostalgia and I won’t deny that hearing the soundtrack for the first time in decades transported me back to simpler times if only for a brief moment. It might not have been one of Capcom’s best, it’s a solid B tier game and is still better than what most other developers had to offer at the time.