![]() ![]() Little Nightmares doesn’t rely on a monochromatic palette to achieve its unwholesome atmosphere.The kitchen where Six must hide from two hulking, fat, malformed butchers is well-lit, with splashes of red and yellow and green. There's color in Six's nightmare world, and not just in her yellow coat. For all that they made me recoil, something about them was also pathetically charming, all of them too misshapen to quite capture the bright little girl evading them. They reminded me of some of the lumpier, less friendly creations of the Jim Henson Workshop, with a sprinkling of Hieronymus Bosch. The other denizens of Six's world are monstrous, but just human enough. This unease and Little Nightmares' grotesque look and feel is where it truly succeeds. ![]() Every room rocks faintly from side to side, creating a queasy feeling of seasickness that enhances the overall unsettling atmosphere. Little Nightmares kept me off balance by constantly changing the world around me, with only one constant. I could never quite get my bearings on where I was supposed to be - A boat? A prison? An asylum? A nursery? A restaurant? - and that seems intentional. The game's title is apt here Little Nightmares follows a dream logic, where each new room might be completely different from the last. Named or not, that little girl creeps and crawls her way through a shifting dark setting that never quite makes logical sense, armed only with a lighter. Nothing concrete about Little Nightmares' plot appears in text in the game. Her name is Six - according to promotional materials, at least. Stuck in Little Nightmares big dark world is a little girl in a bright yellow rain slicker. Little Nightmares is a balancing act: between light and darkness, sound and silence, annoyance and satisfaction.Īnd, most importantly, it's creepy. ![]() While I found myself inevitably frustrated as a tiny thing in a world of dangers who died a lot, that irritation was balanced out by how the gameplay kept shifting so I never quite died the same way twice. For all that Little Nightmares is unquestionably a horror game, there is something a bit precious about it like Limbo and Inside, it's a game about someone small and helpless working their way through a dangerous and frightening world.īut Little Nightmares is a few shades brighter, with hints of dark humor weaving through genuinely disturbing moments. Little Nightmares is the creation of the Swedish Tarsier Studios, which previously worked on the far cuter and cuddlier LittleBigPlanet series. I shook it off easily enough, but those few drowsy fearful moments marked Little Nightmares as a success in at least one aspect: it gave me the damn heebie-jeebies. Little Nightmares gave me an actual nightmare.Īs I drifted off after an evening of playing the spooky puzzle-platformer, my mind filled with images of unnaturally long arms reaching for tiny hooded figures and I woke with my heart racing. ![]()
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