Little Nightmares 2
PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Child’s play isn’t just for fun. Sometimes it can be a survival strategy, a response to environments that frighten because they simply aren’t built for the body you inhabit. Thus the creeping heart of Tarsier’s Little Nightmares: a series that casts you as a lost child in a world designed not just for grown-ups, but grown-ups as a child might see them – huge and distorted by perspective, the grotesque masters of spaces that dwarf and entrap you.
To move through those spaces you must play around with them, always at the risk of being caught and punished. “A door is such a mundane object for adults, but for kids – almost by necessity, they have to turn it into a game,” senior narrative designer David Mervik tells us. “They have to leap off the couch and grab the handle and somehow manage to swing it open. It’s kind of the cornerstone of our game, the fun of that, though it’s not much fun to be in the Little Nightmares world.” The sequel, which is being made by a much larger and more confident team, only deepens that mixture of whimsy and dread. It trades the first game’s seaborne abattoir for Limbo-esque forests and a shivering Pale City, stained by the glare of flickering televisions. There’s a new star, the paper-bag-wearing Mono, with original protagonist Six tagging along as an AI character – a recipe for slightly more elaborate puzzles. “We have a dedicated team working on our companion AI and they’ve spent a lot of time giving her a personality, her own motivations, and I think that comes across when you play,” level and technical designer Matthew Compher explains. “She’s not just a drone following you around.” Like Ico’s Yorda, Six has a degree of autonomy, sometimes leading, sometimes hanging back, sometimes holding Mono’s hand and sometimes hovering over an object you need.
Together, you embark on a wordless quest to reach the source of a mysterious broadcast – the setting’s denizens appear in thrall to this transmission, while the televisions seem to serve as a means of teleportation. Naturally, Tarsier is reluctant to go into details. “The main theme is escapism – that cat’s out of the bag – but it’s always about the variation on the theme,” Mervik notes. “The greed and consumption [theme] of the first game was present in so many different ways. Eating flesh was one. So yeah, the surprise really is in how escapism is presented.”
In key respects, Little Nightmares 2 follows firmly in its predecessor’s footsteps: there’s the same marvellously intricate “dollhouse” perspective, the same devouring shadows, the same debts to Tarsier’s old gig LittleBigPlanet in the emphasis on physics in puzzles.
Above all, this is still a game about living alongside monstrous adults, not just defeating or evading them but shadowing them through their lairs as they go about their lives. “Like in the first game, you’ll see these monsters doing their daily chores, they do have a life other than just like hunting you down,” associate producer Camilla Carstensen says. “And we like our monsters to have these small ticks and oddities, because that’s what creates a personality and also makes you connect to them.”
The menagerie includes a stitchedtogether, shotgun-wielding Hunter and a spectral Thin Man, who paces the city’s streets like negative space incarnate. The worst we’ve seen so far, however, is the Teacher, an unblinking harridan with an extending neck. “I believe that the Hunter was more based on a prototype, whereas the Teacher, she originated from a drawing,”
Carstensen goes on. “Once we have an idea, we iterate on its design, and then we add layers of personality to these characters. That can be a very long and painful process, at least the art part of it – hundreds of sketches of these characters until we find something that’s good. It’s kind of like getting to know somebody, because we need to figure out what makes this creature tick.”
The location design is part of that process – by the time you see a monster, you should have guessed its form and habits from the grim contents of its home. Creating interiors that are navigable yet not designed for the player’s character is a “really delicate balance”, Compher acknowledges. “Scale is really, really difficult and it’s something we struggled with in the first game. Our artists work closely with designers to get that scale right, but it’s a unique challenge because most of the time in videogames, the world is meant for you.”
Somewhat to our shock, Tarsier doesn’t regard Little Nightmares as a horror franchise. “I think the word horror comes with a lot of baggage,” Compher observes. “I’ve always felt it was more a suspenseful adventure. Maybe you get a feeling of unease or tension, but I never really felt like we intended to make the player feel scared.” Mervik is similarly wary of the label’s associations. “It’s terrifying. It’s just not things jumping out of wardrobes and violins screeching in the background.”
Resisting the designation of “horror game” perhaps makes Tarsier more able to walk the tricky line between alluding to realworld atrocities and reducing them to grisly mood devices: the first game included depictions of suicide and imagery of discarded shoes reminiscent of the Holocaust. “This is a fantasy world, but the game and the wrapping are born of the ugliness of the real world,” Mervik comments of the latter scene. “It’s not a reference to it, but of course it would be disingenuous to claim that we don’t know about things like that.” The games seldom portray violence – rather, they show you its aftermath, which is both less immediately disturbing and more powerful, “because your imagination is doing the work”. That said, Mervik adds, “if you’re constantly going, ‘Hang on though, this might also be a problem…’ you end up doing nothing, if you take it to the nth degree. And that’s not to say we don’t care or we’re not aware that those things exist. We don’t do anything wantonly or to be edgy or to offend.”
Towards the end of our interview, a very obvious question occurs to us: do the makers of Little Nightmares have children, and how does that change their understanding of their game? Compher remarks that art director Per Bergman has used his son as a reference for certain animations, but is uncertain about the impact of his own experiences of fatherhood. “I’m not sure I’ve consciously considered the relationship between having a kid and how we make the game. I’d guess it makes it easier to imagine how to make playful moments, but I don’t know if it’s had a huge effect.” We’re not sure we want him to ponder it too deeply. The jury’s out on how much Little Nightmares 2 changes about its predecessor, but in an industry dedicated to giving the player stature and agency, few studios are this good at making you feel small. ■
“The game and the wrapping are born of the ugliness of the real world”