
I thought that Neverending Nightmares would be a great opportunity to bring those to life." "These were very upsetting, and as soon as I became comfortable with a particular image, my mind would dream up an even more intense and awful image that would make me miserable. "When I started thinking about how to represent my obsessive compulsive disorder, one of the main things I struggled with are intrusive thoughts, violent thoughts of self-harm," Gilgenbach says. His mind began to fill with images of self-inflicted violence and he longed for an outlet to express the overwhelming nature of these thoughts.

He slipped into depression, something he'd faced earlier in his life. Neverending Nightmares spawned from a dark period in Gilgenbach's life, as described to Joystiq (now Engadget) in 2014: His game, Retrograde, had just bombed and he was financially downtrodden. They serve a profound purpose as he attempts to demonstrate the depth of his own depressive thoughts.

For creator Matt Gilgenbach, these scenes are the heart of Neverending Nightmares, though they're not gory for the sake of gore.

It's done in the same Edward Gorey-esque art style, filled with scratchy black lines and explosions of red highlighting gruesome scenes of disembowelment, murder and torture. So far, the manga is just as brazen in its depiction of suffering and death. The protagonist, Thomas, is trapped in a hellscape loop, repeatedly waking up only to realize he's still in a terrible nightmare: Headless corpses are piled against black-and-white walls bodies hang from meat hooks in a claustrophobic cell Thomas pulls a vein from his wrist like a stray thread. As a game, Neverending Nightmares is a chilling, powerful peek into the darkest thoughts of a person struggling with depression and intrusive thoughts. This is how the video game Neverending Nightmares begins, and it's also the first scene in a manga of the same name that debuted last week. A knife that your hands are grasping tightly. You follow her gaze down - a knife protrudes from her stomach, staining her dress bright red, blood dribbling into her socks and Mary Janes.

Her mouth gapes and blood drips past her lips. And then, suddenly, she isn't: Her doe eyes widen, white and afraid. You don't know her name, but she's smiling warmly. She can't be older than 8, with long, straight black hair and a frilled dress. She stands in front of you, clutching a teddy bear to her chest.
