Little Nightmares 2

PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Developer Tarsier Studios

Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5,

Xbox One, Switch, Xbox Series

Release Out now

At times, Little Nightmares 2 feels a little lost in the woods. While a menacing work of architecture and lighting, it lacks the obscene overall cohesion of the 2017 original, in which you guide a small girl, Six, through the workings of an enormous meat factory. It sometimes feels more like a DLC season, in fact, with levels knocking rather than locking together. This is especially true of the opening forest area, where new poster boy Mono bursts out of a mysterious television. Beginning your seven-hour journey to the right, you find Six trapped in the house of an ogreish Hunter. It’s a delightful quagmire of a level, a greasy reincarnation of Limbo’s wilderness, but it’s also a prelude, geographically and thematically detached from the warping Pale City where most of the game is set. For all his gruesome, sewn-together appearance, the Hunter is a mild letdown next to the original’s denizens, chasing you with a shotgun in the first of many frenzied getaway sequences.

Things pick up quickly, however, when Mono and Six arrive at the City’s outskirts. Here you meet the Teacher, a deceptively rickety and sweet-faced old lady, presiding over a class of chattering, murderous puppets. As ever in Little Nightmares, the ghastliness lies partly in how the emphasis on stealth forces you to study her, lurking behind a jar of formaldehyde as the creature stuffs organs into anatomical models, or raps the fingers of errant pupils. Little Nightmares is one of a few horror games that gets away with leaving its monsters in full view, because the horror of them isn’t about simple grotesqueness but witnessing and, despite yourself, understanding their work. Each of the game’s simple door-and-key puzzles – obtaining fuses for a powerbox, finding a hammer to smash through boards – is as much an exercise in fleshing out your adversary’s habits as opening the path.

Children in this world are at once coveted and hated. They are both toys the adults hanker for and invasive vermin, traversing the contours in ways their elders find alarming – hence the screeching dismay when the Teacher spies you crawling into a vent. It’s possible to sympathise with this revulsion, however revolting the creature expressing it. As the title suggests, there’s a sense that the real monsters in Little Nightmares are the kids.

This is certainly true of Six, now demoted to an AI-controlled sidekick. She’s seen and endured plenty by the time Mono meets her, and is a deft balance of assertive and spaced-out, sometimes leading the way up a ladder, sometimes kicking her heels as you scratch your head over a blocked elevator. The two characters make a charming duo – Six with her pointed yellow hood, Mono with his square paper hat. But if Mono wants to be Ico, Six very much isn’t Yorda. She has a malevolent side, and Little Nightmares 2 does an excellent job of teasing this out – or rather, of lulling you into thinking of her as a passive presence, only to surprise you with some tiny act of cruelty that is more unsettling than any creature you’ll encounter.

Little Nightmares 2 may lack the original game’s more focused setting, but it does have a unifying motif in the form of televisions, which appear everywhere: floating on the tide, poking from walls of rubbish, glaring behind shower curtains. They are conduits for a signal that vanishes and disfigures, leaving behind it creatures with sucked-off faces vomiting white noise. At the heart of the transmission is a remorselessly advancing Tall Man who phases through doors and discolours the air around him: Slenderman with a touch of Sadako.

The TV makes a less visceral horror theme than the first game’s meditation on the obscenity of eating flesh. It feels quaint at first, tapping into clichés nowadays associated with parodies such as WandaVision. But it evolves into something weirder. The game’s portrayal of TVs often feels like a sneaky meditation on the Internet, with screens serving as two-way portals to a kind of collective subconsciousness. As his name suggests, Mono has a certain power over the Pale City’s corrupting signal. At intervals you run into a blaring TV screen that threatens to overwhelm his senses. By placing a hand on it, Mono can unscrew the distorted image and, eventually, open a passage to that hidden world.

Story ramifications aside, this act of straightening and unflattening forms a sly deconstruction of the slightly contentious ‘2.5D’ style. Some might argue that

Little Nightmares would be a better game with pure 2D navigation rather than side-on 3D. As in Tarsier’s previous LittleBigPlanet titles, it can be fiddly lining up jumps toward or away from the viewpoint. It’s never a deal-breaker – locations are strewn with depth markers such as square floor tiles – but there’s a lot of trial and error, particularly as regards some fleeting combat elements and a final boss encounter that is mesmerising but frustratingly dependent on timing. We’re not sure what we’d change, however. The awkward handling suits a world that isn’t designed for your character’s proportions, and the experience would be far less oppressive without the frequent deaths.

Little Nightmares 2 is a slight dispersal of the original’s concepts, adding some fabulous locations and grotesques without cleaning up the platforming or developing a soul of its own, but it’s in some ways a more complex horror story. We’re still mulling over the implications of its fixation with screens. It’s also a meditation on the tension between young and old that has only become more relevant as generational inequalities mount and business-as-usual thinking steers the planet towards climate disaster. This will hit home harder if you’re a parent yourself. You might play as Six and Mono, scrambling to find a way out of a collapsing reality. But do you see yourself in these children, or in the adults struggling to contain them?