Nemesis: Lockdown

Nemesis: Lockdown digitises the Lockdown expansion of Awaken Realms' Nemesis board game: a doomed space station, a creature that can't be killed outright, and a handful of characters each nursing a private, potentially group-sabotaging objective. It's not the only Nemesis game on Steam — a separate, unrelated real-time horror title called Nemesis: Distress also exists, and at least one reviewer took the time to flag the distinction explicitly, so it's worth naming here too. InterStudio's version entered Early Access on 31 May 2022 and left it for a full release on 17 November 2022, and reviewers who know the source material are consistently positive about how faithfully it captures that material's mood.

An adaptation that gets the atmosphere right

The strongest, most consistent praise across this game's review history concerns tone. Reviewers who own and have played the physical board game describe the digital version as genuinely capturing its brutality and dread, and several single out the 3D presentation of the station's cramped, poorly-lit corridors as making the creature encounters more viscerally unsettling than they expected a digital port to manage. One early reviewer calls the atmosphere "10/10 right out of the gate," a sentiment echoed by later reviewers years into the game's life — a rare point of near-total agreement running through an otherwise mixed review base.

Solo play that can't do what the board game's solo mode does

The most specific, recurring complaint is about playing alone. The physical Nemesis board game supports solo play by letting one person control multiple characters; this digital adaptation doesn't, restricting solo sessions to a single character. Multiple reviewers, several explicitly identifying themselves as long-time fans of the tabletop game, report this makes certain objectives — "explore all rooms" is cited specifically by more than one reviewer — effectively impossible to complete solo, since the board game's own design assumes a player can spread tasks across several characters they control themselves. There are no AI-controlled bots and no local couch co-op to soften this gap, meaning the intended full experience genuinely requires other human players, every time.

A population that's aged out of the game's own design

That dependency on other players is a growing problem, and it's one this review can trace directly through the game's own patch history. InterStudio shipped updates at a reasonable pace through Early Access and the November 2022 full release, including a Japanese localisation patch in mid-2023, but the public record this review pulled from the developer's own Steam events feed shows nothing since a 1.0.0.7 update on 8 April 2024 — over two years before this review. Reviewers writing in late 2025 and mid-2026 describe exactly the consequence you'd expect: a multiplayer population thin enough that finding an online match can take a long wait, if it happens at all, turning a game whose main mode is built around other people into one where that mode is now unreliable on its own terms.

Bugs, a missing save feature, and a UI the board game did better

Beyond the structural issues, reviewers report a scattering of more ordinary problems that compound the picture. At least one reviewer describes the game freezing mid-session during an enemy-phase transition, severe enough to require force-closing the process, and multiple reviewers independently note there's no save feature — meaning a crash like that one can cost an entire run's progress with no way to resume it. Separately, several reviewers who know the physical board game well say the digital interface and ship-layout readability are actually harder to parse than the cardboard original, a specific and slightly unusual complaint: most board-game adaptations are praised for tidying up a physical game's bookkeeping, and here reviewers say the opposite happened.

An achievement record that hints at a small, churned player base

Steam's global achievement data offers a rough but useful proxy for how far the average buyer actually gets, and this game's numbers are notably low even by the standards of a niche adaptation. Across 35 tracked achievements, this review found the single most-earned one sits at roughly a third of the player base, and the great majority trail off into single digits or below one percent. That's a meaningfully flatter, lower curve than a typical game where a handful of early milestones clear 70–90% before tapering — here even the easiest, earliest goals aren't reaching most owners. Read alongside the review base's own complaints about a punishing tutorial, a crippled solo mode and a thinning multiplayer population, the achievement data reads less like a hardcore game with a dedicated core and more like a game a lot of buyers try briefly and then set down.

A steep price for an increasingly narrow experience

At roughly NZ$36, Nemesis: Lockdown isn't a cheap purchase, and the value case has narrowed considerably since launch. A buyer today is paying full price for a game whose solo mode can't replicate a meaningful share of the board game's own solo design, whose main multiplayer mode is reported as increasingly hard to matchmake into, and which hasn't received a patch in over two years despite ongoing bug reports. None of that erases the genuine atmospheric strength reviewers consistently credit it with — but it does mean that strength is reaching fewer players in the conditions it was actually designed for.

Where it lands

Nemesis: Lockdown succeeds at the one thing hardest to fake in a board-game adaptation: making the tabletop's specific dread and brutality feel real in a different medium. But a solo mode that can't do what the board game's own solo mode does, a multiplayer population that's visibly thinned out since the last update over two years ago, a missing save feature, and a UI that reviewers who know the source material call a downgrade are real, well-documented costs. A 4 reflects a game whose best qualities are genuine but increasingly hard for a new buyer to actually access.