Book Review : Nostalgia Nest (2026)

Although it merely feels good, nostalgia is not a simple feeling. It's a conflict the present is losing against the past, but might win against the future. It's a celebration of how you've felt at a certain moment in your life protecting you against the way you're feeling now, whether you're feeling terrible or just ordinary. It's a reading of the past that is technically wrong, but gives meaning to the here and the now anyway. Nostalgia can be considered corny, but it is almost never thought to be dangerous.

The Salamander King's new video game lore book Nostalgia Nest doesn't ask the question. It flat out tells you to run for your life.

In case you're not familiar with the concept, Nostalgia Nest is a manual for a video game that never existed. Yes, it's a thing and it's great. Originally sold as Nostalgia Simulator, it featured high quality graphics for 1997 and circulated briefly among gaming communities, but slipped into obscurity because of lack of marketing, in-game bugs and poor reviews. But it resurfaces in the dreams and intrusive thoughts of the few who played the game and gained cult status ever since.

Something You Can Feel, But Can’t Quite Verbalize

Disclaimer : The Salamander King reveals the Rosetta Stone to Nostalgia Nest at the end and simple and more devastating than whatever you can imagine, but his lore manual had already landed with me by then. A work so evocative and powerful that’s sometimes surreal and abstract lends itself to personal readings, but I believe mine will resonate with others. In Nostalgia Nest, the past wears a familiar and comforting face, but that face is just a mask that conceals something hostile and unknowable.

That tension between your adulthood and the unspeakable, inarticulable horrors hidden in Nostalgia Nest is where the narrative thrives, because half of it lives in your head. The video game manual format lends itself to horror so well for this particular reason: it gives you a framework on which to project fears and anxieties that are entirely your own and the visions of Nostalgia Nest are so original, grotesque and impossible to succinctly describe that they will force you back to a state where you didn't have the word to express yourself.

A second floor only accessible on nights of new moons, a man held prisoner by the wallpaper, a corridor of endless doorways that traps you into an infinite loop, a menacing hive made out of electrical wires, the visions are incongruous, but undoubtedly violent. As a player, you're trapped into an eternal past that keeps you prisoner from birth to old age unless you can figure your way out and although it seems comforting in a quiet and eerie way at first, it is not a place you want to live forever in.

In Nostalgia Nest, the past is trying to contaminate the present like a parasite from outer space. Although it wears the skin of a past you remember fondly, something has went profoundly out of control in the way in lives inside you. There are a lot of references to human anatomy, hinting at the probability that something is wrong with you and that nostalgia is no way to escape anymore. The only way to figure a way out of this nightmare is to will yourself back in the now and act upon it.

Discomfort As A Means Of Connection With Yourself

I don’t think anything I’ve said so far invalidates the very clear purpose of Nostalgia Nest as stated by The Salamander King, but it does raise a fascinating philosophical question: is the comfort brought from the past like a thick mist a good thing? What does create meaning? An arbitrary reassertion of a past drained of discomfort or the overcoming of that discomfort in real time? Nostalgia Nest is very much structurally an argument for the latter. The purpose of the game is not to let the past trap you.

Even though it's sold to you as a theoretical comforter, nostalgia has been constantly gaining ground for the past twenty years. Late philosopher Mark Fisher has written the definitive argument on the topic in his now iconic piece The Slow Cancellation of the Future, but nothing has made me feel the weight of its existential threat the way Nostalgia Nest did and it did in a way that's urgent and intuitive. The same way a three years old feels walking through his house with the lights closed.

*

Nostalgia Nest is another home run for Hollow Press and another example of how lore manuals for video games that never existed are a new way of mining unexplored creativity. I ordered it thirty seconds after learning of its existence because the art spoke to me on a visceral level and the content didn’t disappoint. If you enjoyed Skinamarink and the works of B.R Yeager, this is right in your wheelhouse. A profound, meditative and ghoulish experience that will probe the nature of your relationship with the past.

8.8/10

* Follow me on Instagram , Bluesky and Substack to keep up with new posts *