![]() Six’s tiny footsteps and the swishing of her yellow raincoat have the tendency to echo off surrounding cold metal walls, so if you’re not careful, her dainty interruptions will alert the nearest abomination. There’s honestly nothing more terrifying than complete silence, and Little Nightmares utilizes the absence of sound with chilling authority. Most of the time, lack of music in a video game would be grounds for harsh criticism, but not necessarily when it comes to survival horror. The one exception are the Nomes, tiny pyramid-headed beings that Six rescues by-and how adorable is this-hugging them. It’s a gritty celebration of the gluttonous, the grotesque, the misshapen, and the malformed. Just wait until you witness the jerky, off-putting stop-motion twitching of the Janitor, a blind custodian that likes to wrap up children in dirty cocoons and send them packing on motorized meat hooks. Plus their movement-oh god, their movement. They sound hideous, too, especially the disgusting Chefs, and frankly, I’m still haunted by the ghostly humming of the game’s final boss. They all have this rotten fruit, mushed clay aesthetic: Melted faces, limbs that defy nature, eyes that are either incorrectly proportioned or simply not there at all. off ? Little Nightmares takes this notion and gallops with it, presenting a marauding cast of disturbing unthinkables that don’t exactly adhere to the notion of healthy human symmetry. The game’s inhabitants are legitimate nightmare fuel.Įver have one of those terrible something-isn’t-quite-right dreams? You know, where everyone you meet has physical features that are just ever-so-slightly. It’s Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, but on a boat from hell. Not necessarily enough to make you queasy, but just enough to make you feel uneasy. And because the game occurs on open water, the screen is constantly but slowly tilting from side to side. Diseased rats scurry in the wet darkness while ungodly tar leeches push through rusted drainage grates, their sucking, grasping mouthparts illuminated by Six’s trusty lighter as she narrowly squeezes by. Rooms and hallways are dark, dank, and dangerous, peppered with dripping pipes, clanking elevators, claustrophobic crawl spaces and perilous drop-offs. Imagine a cruise ship captained by Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark illustrator Stephen Gammell, catered by Vincent Price and furnished by Guillermo del Toro. Little Nightmares takes place inside a surrealistic ocean getaway known simply as The Maw, and holy Silent Hill is it one disquieting and miserable place. The environments are relentlessly bleak and oppressive. Narrow escapes and close calls are Six’s specialty.Ģ. Just be prepared to flee on a moment's notice, as being chased is a common occurrence. She can’t attack adversaries directly, but her cunning alone results in some extraordinary enemy fatalities. Known simply as Six, this raincoat-clad spitfire goes to incredible lengths to escape the insane denizens of a sinister seaward purgatory, snatching up scrumptious scraps of food to stay alive as she goes. ![]() Granted, I spent most of the game wanting to jump into the screen and protect her from every unspeakable evil, but really, she did just fine on her own. ![]() Why the excitement? I guess the casting just isn't very common, so it’s nice to see a young girl represented as the unlikely hero, especially in a horror adventure. I may just be a big softie, but ever since I got wind of Little Nightmares’ impending release, I’ve been genuinely psyched that its mighty protagonist is basically someone’s pint-sized, nine-year-old kid sister. The main character is a tenacious little girl. Now take my hand -we're about to step into the shadows. ![]() It's starkly mature in its depiction of certain realistic terrors and might not be a wholesome experience for anyone with an overactive imagination. And by the way, this is a game about a kid, but despite my post's facetious headline, I'd strongly advise against letting kids play. So in the spirit of my unabashed love for everything horror, I thought I’d scare up a list of why Little Nightmares screams all the right bone-chilling notes, how it perfectly impales all those unsettling nuances. Think clinically depressed Tim Burton combined with early American Horror Story, especially those delightfully unnerving intro sequences. Kids have been placed in serious danger within the confines of other macabre titles like Playdead’s Limbo and Inside, but this here, this is a new breed of grim. Tarsier Studios seems to have asked the question, “What’s the worst possible situation we could put a starving child into?” then built a stealth horror puzzle-platformer around the awful answer. Even so, the original sentiment still rings true-without a doubt, this is one disturbing game, and I loved every grisly moment of it.
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