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.
And the issues are worth braving because Little Nightmares is an exceptional example of horror done right on a small scale.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.
The long loading screens remain a but of an issue but it's nothing a quick patch won't fix. It uses environmental storytelling to great effect to tell a dark and unsettling story that's rounded out beautifully by the DLC. The only issue with handheld mode is that a game this dark will constantly be ruined by reflections, so unless you're playing inside a dark room, handheld mode is less than ideal.Īt the end of the day, Little Nightmares is a gorgeous and creepy horror game with gorgeous art and lighting and great character and environment designs, rounded out by some of the best sound design in the genre. Little Nightmares is best experience in docked mode on a big screen where you have the luxury to carefully study all of the little details, although the game holds up perfectly in handheld mode, too. The DLC even bothers to explain the Gnomes you find skittering around the ship. You're understand early enough that Six isn't what she seems to be, but the DLC does a phenomenal job of fleshing out the characters she meets along the way, as well as the environments they live in. This alleviated somewhat by generous checkpoints, making sure you never respawn too far from where you last fell.Īs wonderfully abstract as the story in Little Nightmares is, the Switch port goes the extra mile by including the DLC that further fleshes out the narrative, fully rounding up this messed up saturnine mystery. Sometimes the deaths come from being unable to tell, because of the camera, whether you're in line with a ledge you're jumping at, which tends to feel really cheap. Every death will take you out of the game for a good 20-25 seconds.
The gameplay, like INSIDE, consists of a lot of trial-and-error platforming, which is a bit of a problem in this version because the load times are excruciatingly long.