Stuck in a floating fortress and trying to escape from nightmarish monstrosities armed only with a lighter and the ability to sneak, ‘Little Nightmares’ is a game that seems as intense and impactful as it is cute and artistic. It’s time to ‘play with your childhood fears…’
In modern games you are more often than not put in the shoes of a person with near endless destructive abilities and resources. This has changed in some recent horror games but even then, none of them make you feel completely powerless against the forces of evil. Introducing Little Nightmares created by Swedish gaming company Tarsier studios. The games places you in the shoe-less feet of heroine Six, a nine year old girl with absolutely no offensive capability in a overbearing world of twisted locales and monstrous denizens.
That may sound like a terrible way to play a game but the restrictions placed upon you not only make the brief five hour game more enthralling, but this also creates gut wrenching levels of fear and anticipation as you quietly survey your surroundings and hope nothing is around the next corner. Of course there isn’t something around every corner but the pacing, lighting and eerie soundtrack make you feel as if someone is watching, waiting for the perfect time to strike.
The worst part about all this tension building is in the moments when you come face to disfigured face with your aggressors. In that moment the fear of something jumping out at you becomes a fear of being caught. The gargantuan inhabitants of ‘The Maw’ are both passive and hostile as they go about their business only to turn and shriek if your presence is detected, weirdly the enemies shrieks seem to be fearful rather then aggressive, turning a simple terrifying encounter into a more uncomfortable and thought provoking event.
The feeling of tension and queasiness is only exacerbated by the outstanding art style, taking nightmarish ideas and bringing them to life. Every part of the environment has elements of movement that draw your eye into the dark recesses. The lighting in between areas draws you to look at certain parts without you consciously knowing it. The lighting itself is made even more impressive by the fact that you have a lighter that you can use at any point in the game which reacts with the surrounding environment changing instantly how daunting a certain passage or grate can feel.The design of the characters also plays into this with Six wearing a bright yellow mac that massively contrasts with the dark natural tones of the rest of the characters, who have a grotesque stop motion feel to their movements and appearance.
On paper Little Nightmares is essentially a side scrolling platform with some elements of puzzle solving and some sneaking thrown in, but what you play is so much more than that. Sure it has some annoying sections where the checkpoint system keeps putting you way too far back if you fail and the amount of loading that happens for the size of the game is strange, but that can all be forgotten when you consider that a basic game about a child trying to escape fear is one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a long while.
If you’re a fan of survival horror games or even if you’re someone who likes a nice indie title with a unique style, then Little Nightmares should be something you pick up either as a physical disk or by downloading it onto the console of your choice.
Author: Hal, Plymouth store
