I Don't Understand Little Nightmares

Little Nightmares is a horror/ platformer/ puzzle/ stealth game released in April of 2017 for PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and mobile. With three separate DLC levels released over the span of nine months. The second game was released in September, 2021 for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch. Soon followed by an enhanced port for PS5 and Xbox X/S. I won't be covering the enhanced edition, since I played the PC port of both games and preferred the stable framerate my computer could provide, to any ray tracing or texture enhancements the enhanced edition provided.

I'd like, foremost and before any other critique or evaluation, to state that the Little Nightmares games are objectively good. They are finely crafted works of art from Tarsier Studios. Every frame of every level is a gorgeous painting that does justice to their inspirations. If Tarsier's next project, Reanimal, is accurate to its reveal trailer, I'll doubtlessly be playing that game too. If for no other reason, then for the vibes. I haven't read any extra material for either game, be they sister comics that explain some aspects of the lore, or simply Wikipedia entries that clarify some characters or plot beats. However, I have watched reviews from some high profile Youtubers, mostly in an effort to get a fresh pair of eyes on these games, that I'll be dropping below the article. I'll be tackling the games in order of release instead of chronological order, as that's how I played them. Spoilers ahead for both games and any DLC.

So, in Little Nightmares you play as a two-inch-tall child wearing a yellow raincoat. As a goblin, I relate pretty hard. They're apparently a girl named Six for certain lore reasons, but since I stayed away from any external stories that may color my view of the games, I got that info from the Steam webpage. The overarching story of the game goes like this: as Six, you play through five different chapters, with each one having a specific antagonist. In each chapter you either escape from or kill your enemies and Six progressively becomes more hungry. First eating bread, then raw meat, then a live rat, then a living creature (the species of which I have dubbed gnomes), and finally commits cannibalism of a lady who resembles a geisha. Six then inherits some form of dark power and walks outside onto an island, despite the fact the game took place on a boat. If you feel I have ignored some plot critical elements, I insist I haven't. The game has no dialogue or understandable language outside of the tutorials and main menu. Details like the children imprisoned by the man with long arms, the Studio Ghibli style humans shoveling meat into their mouths, and the creature living in a pit of shoes hold no relevance to any other character and don't come up outside of the respective chapter they're in. Now, the game is only about three hours long on a leisurely playthrough, and that comes with some assumptions. Just like how I don't expect a short horror story, a la Ted the Caver or The Yellow Wallpaper, to have deep and gripping characters or stories, it feels unfair to demand the same from Little Nightmares. But, I feel that they at least have intricate themes that weave through their narratives. The folly of human arrogance, a hunger for knowledge, untreated mental illness, and the possibility of facing creatures and concepts that exist out of our immediate world view. Like placing your hand behind your head, its effects are felt, but you have no way of seeing it. If these themes weave into good short stories like a steel cable, Little Nightmares feels a bit more like a short bolt of yarn. There's certainly a theme there about gluttony, consumerism, and power, but it doesn't feel like these ideas are connected to much of anything else in the game's setting or mechanics. Six's hunger doesn't affect the gameplay in any significant way. You never have to play through a full set-piece while stricken with hunger pains, since you always die in one hit you can't heal by eating, and whenever Six does eat it always happens in a brief cutscene. Of course, the game prides itself on its brevity and straightforward platforming and puzzle solving. The only three buttons you have are jump, grab, and using your lighter. As a matter of fact, if you were to skip past the one section with the hanging corpse right at the beginning of the game, Little Nightmares makes for a great entry point to horror for little kids. The designs are putrid but still feel whimsical in that Tim Burton way, there's no blood or gore in the game outside of the kitchen where the chef butchers some unrecognizable meat, and the game's generous autosave system prevents it from feeling overly stressful at any point. None of these are problems. My problem with the game's feel and vibe comes when I can't tell if this is the first draft idea they had, or the sixty-seventh. Either the writers threw in every concept and let the pieces fall where they may, or this is a heavily edited down version of the game in which nothing is quite as substantial as the developers intended. Perhaps the geisha woman with the white mask was a malevolent force throughout the whole experience originally, and the long-armed man had more room to breathe and show why he kidnaps children and what significance he holds to Six and her hunger. As the game is, I feel about it how I feel about the DLC and the second game: I like the game, but I don't love it. It really feels like a game that needs a sequel to come along and tighten up all of its loose ends.

The DLC chapters, The Depths, The Hideaway, and The Residence, are separate in story and feel to the base game. It's still a little odd they weren't sold as one package since the three chapters make one story, but I suppose that's what the expansion pass is for. Can't believe they're putting season passes in my indie horror platformers now. Anyway, the DLC chapters follow an unnamed little boy just called The Runaway or The Kid. The plot is even simpler. You escape from the long-armed man, traverse a flooded house, a coal mine, and eventually the house of the pale masked lady. You try to defeat her but she turns you into a gnome, giving a backstory to the gnome that Six would eat near the end of the base game. These games have a proclivity towards explaining the few things I don't care to know the history of. That aside, the DLC chapters seem much more interested in gameplay than expanding the setting or giving the player a new view on the events of the base game. The puzzles were much more brain taxing and I especially liked The Hideaway, where you round up gnomes like little goblins from Overlord and have them help you with menial labor. The final chapter even flirts with combat by having you shine a flashlight at enemies to destroy them. As I would find out, this is as good or better than the combat in the second game. In all honesty, I much preferred the gameplay of the DLC chapters to the base game, even if the tiny amount of story presented was even less impressive. If you enjoy Little Nightmares, the three DLC aren't required but they're good for what they are.
Little Nightmares II is interesting in that it has a much more narrative driven adventure over its five-hour run. However, that narrative somehow feels both more and less straightforward than Little Nightmares. Alright, so, you play as a boy that everything advertising the game has dubbed Mono. Through his mannerisms, it's pretty clear that Mono is a much kinder kid than our previous protagonist. Although, that doesn't mean much, as Six had no characterization outside of spontaneous acts of degenerate violence. So it's a good start. Near the start of the game, you break into a hunter's cabin and rescue another child. The two of you escape and end up on the other side of a river, going into the heart of a city with tall crooked buildings and breaking into a school. The two encounter a honestly ghoulish teacher with a snake-like neck and evil school children made of porcelain (don't ask). Once again escaping your attacker, Mono's companion finds a child's yellow coat on the ground, revealing that she is, in fact, Six from Little Nightmares and the second game is a prequel. After moving through the hospital, the worst and longest chapter of the game, the two escape. Seemingly, most areas have been mere obstacles on their path. Until reaching the second to last chapter, taking place inside the main city. Mono and Six meet an entity I lovingly refer to as "The Hat Man". Basically Slenderman with a swanky fedora. He seems to assert some control over televisions, the same ones that hypnotize all the enemies of this chapter. He also happens to steal your friend Six. After running from him in some Uncharted style escape sequences, he hunts you down and Mono gives up the chase and lets the Hat Man win. But wait, secretly Mono also has TV powers and he has an epic force duel with the Hat Man, who he kills. Then, using his unlocked TV powers, Mono conjures a door to enter the TV dimension and save his friend Six, who Slender Hat Man has turned into a monster, or maybe she did that to herself. You rescue her and the TV dimension begins to collapse into meat and eyeballs until it consumes everything except the door to escape. Six drops you off of a cliff into the meat soup. Either because she figured out your true identity or it just feels too good to be a gangster. She leaves you to your fate, walking out the door. Mono then finds a chair and sits down, not knowing what else to do. But, twist, over a time-lapse it turns out that Mono grows up to become the Hat Man. Which, yes, did make me laugh quite hard. Either this is how Hat Men are created or Mono was the Slender Hat Man all along and it's a closed time loop. Regardless, it's canon that living in the TV dimension will make you grow a sweet hat. That's the plot. I hope I seem a bit more articulate now when I say the story both somehow makes more and less sense than Little Nightmares. For brevity I left out some mechanics and scenes that actually do contribute to the narrative. For instance, you find multiple TVs switched on in the game world that seemingly try to hypnotize you as well. But, Mono has a special relationship with the TVs in which you play a minigame to briefly enter the TV and turn it off. I thought it was really clever that the Epic Hat Man Force Duel used the same mechanics as the minigame, which just felt like tuning a TV to a specific frequency. Also, Six is genuinely well characterized in the ways you'd assume coming from the first game. Any time the two kill an enemy, she is either nonplussed or actively reveling in her murder. And, at the very end of the game, her hunger returns. Perhaps it comes from her time spent in the TV dimension as a Baba Yaga. Stepping towards visuals, my main problem (well, only problem) is the game's color filtering. It's blue, very blue. No colors that are not blue. The TVs are blue, the outdoors are blue, the fluorescent lights are blue. This isn't because of any focused effort, it's just the game's weird as hell color correction. Outside of that one issue, looks just as good as the first game. Every single asset looks handmade and totally unique, like a being a fly on the wall in Coraline's house. So, themes and subtext? Man, I don't know. Someone could easily make an argument that the game's theme is "phone bad" and I could be convinced by it. Why did they choose to, in the span of twenty minutes, introduce, kill, and explain the backstory of the Hat Man if he was the main antagonist? The fact that there are piles of clothes everywhere, as if a lot of people just got raptured, goes completely unacknowledged. Is it just spooky, or does it tie into the plot? It seems that all the people who were hypnotized aren't wearing masks, except for the ones that are. In this way, the second game curves right back around to the first. There's obviously a plot going on with consumerism, institutionalization, and the abuse of the ninety-nine percent. "What's the narrative or thematic point of all this?" Some may ask. I don't have a Scooby. Again, it feels like there were so many ideas they wanted to play with, and very few were focused on. Do the eyeball symbols and literal piles of goo with eyes represent those with power? Maybe, but neither Six nor Mono ever have that imagery applied to them directly. In gameplay the second game is, once again, almost identical to the first, save for one thing: combat. I want to kill two birds with one stone and bring up some changes in how level design interacts with your ability to platform. The game has a mostly two-dimensional perspective, just like Little Nightmares. In that game, platforming was basic. I never really felt like I didn't know where I'd end up while jumping. Little Nightmares II feels like it wanted to be more ambitious with its platforming. A fun little tell you'll see if you look for it, sometimes tables will have tiny flat objects like pans or a gap between two objects so the game can subtly point and say "hey jump from here". I like this detail, but it ultimately feels as though, if this was a problem, why didn't they just give the mechanics a small overhaul so it doesn't matter if the player gets a little confused where they are in the game's space. My immediate comparison is classic Tomb Raider. That's a series with a lot of platforming, but because it feels so precise and every jump requires full commitment, I hardly ever felt like I was unsure of my footing. All of this waffling about your space in the environment feeling vague sort of goes double for combat. So many times I would wait for an enemy to charge up an attack and then just plain miss and die because I had no clue where they were in comparison to me. The combat is very clearly going for a Silent Hill style where it's both cumbersome and satisfying to use. The main issue is, in Silent Hill, I can see exactly how much space is between me and the enemy. The end of the hospital, in which you have to fight two mannequin hands, was easily the worst encounter. They charge their attacks at the same time, sometimes they break their own rules on when you can and can't hit them, and since the developers knew some people would be caught out, they put a checkpoint at the immediate start of the fight. So, there was never any pressure to win. After my fifth try, I succeeded. I wasn't relieved, just mildly annoyed. Same goes for the flashlight encounter a little before that. It's a classic horror trope of stop and go. You look at the enemy, in this case using your flashlight, and they freeze in place. However, I had so many deaths caused by a mannequin starting its grab animation, putting my flashlight on them, and then proceeding to ignore it and kill me. The same issue came up with a few encounters where an enemy would perform an attack animation, I would brain them with a mallet or ladle as a counter attack, and the game would get confused and kill me outright. Calling these mechanics sloppy is a bit too mean and doesn't particularly cover my feelings. I would instead call them undercooked, as if they were a late addition (not necessarily in concept, but more so in implementation). These don't exactly ruin the experience. But, when I had to make an awkward jump or equip a weapon, I wasn't excited or tense, I just hoped the game wouldn't get confused and kill me again. As a point of note, Little Nightmares II felt a little buggy. It even produced my favorite bug in any horror game. In the hospital level, there's a platforming sequence over three beds in a bottomless pit. After jumping I looked over and saw Six jump, donk her head on a bed post, and go plummeting into the pit below. I laughed, but when I immediately heard loud footsteps as she came running out of the hallway and reappeared as if nothing had happened, perfectly mimicking an episode of Spongebob, I couldn't get the air down to laugh any harder. Afterwards, Six stopped feeling all that real to me. The second game also has a bit more of a lean towards set pieces. This isn't a problem inherently, I just found it odd they took a step forward in mechanical depth, but also a step back in player engagement. There are multiple instances where the game forces you to alert an enemy or fall from a great height, basically just taking the controller out of your hand for a second and letting you watch as the situation kind of resolves itself as long as you do exactly what the game needs you to do. I.E shooting the hunter at the beginning of the game, climbing away from the teacher through air vents, running from the Hat Man through a train. These parts, as I usually say, would've made more sense as cutscenes but don't hurt anything by being there. Little Nightmares II is good, but not great.

I've been waxing this hard for three-thousand words just to ask a question. What am I not seeing? Several people, whose opinion I usually find myself agreeing with, say these games are incredible and are worth playing and replaying. I like the atmosphere a lot and find the character designs well done, but I feel like I've seen games that do much better. Games that have no dialogue or just boil down to inspiring a vibe, tone, or feeling land among my favorites. Yume Nikki, Journey, and House.WAD are incredible, and they barely use any dialogue whatsoever to accomplish their goals. Anytime I see something that doesn't immediately make much sense, I feel like there doesn't need to be an answer as long the core idea shines through. But, in the case of Little Nightmares, the focal point feels so jumbled up and competes in importance with everything else the games are trying to say. As a game developer, I get the idea of Journey. It's a beautiful story about fated meetings and the power people have to just do good for each other anonymously. Yume Nikki doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to make sense to me. A dream doesn't have to cohere into a narrative, if the game even is a dream. The vibe and feeling that you impose on Yume Nikki is the primary mode of interaction. So, if I can make all of these allowances for other games and feel like I can understand them, why can't I understand Little Nightmares?