A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a platform game where players control a teenager moving between houses on the titular street. The core objective is to locate all of Freddy Krueger's hidden bones within a level and then incinerate them in the high school furnace to ultimately defeat him.

Gameplay shifts between two distinct states: a waking world and a dream world. The waking world features typical platforming hazards and enemies like snakes and spiders. Here, a sleep meter acts as a buffer, decreasing when the player is hit. If this meter is fully depleted, the player is forced into the dream world, which introduces more spectral enemies and an invisible timer counting down to an unavoidable confrontation with Freddy Krueger. In this dream state, the meter functions as a standard life gauge, and losing all of it costs the player a life.

Players can acquire an advantage by finding special icons in the dream world, which transform them into Dream Warriors with enhanced projectile attacks. Each house level concludes with a boss fight against a creature associated with Freddy, after which a new house becomes accessible. The game supports simultaneous play for up to four participants using specific peripheral hardware.