Post Script

Discussing TV, lore and hope with the man behind the nightmares, David Mervik

Tarsier’s senior narrative designer David Mervik worked on the original Little Nightmares, and joins us here to talk about the process of building a new world that’s every bit as scary, but completely distinct from, the Maw.

In LN2 you lean on fears about the influence of television which are quite old now. Did you consider exploring anxieties about more recent technologies, such as smartphones?

I think with something like a smartphone, it’s almost so common, it would feel dated more quickly. TVs have been around so long that for me, at least, they feel a bit more frozen in time. But I know you mean with the fear of what TV will do to our youth – that was the same with the theatre back in the day, and novels. Some years ago, there were people actually worrying about people reading too much, and how that was going to destroy our brains. That fear has always been around for any kind of new media. But I think the screen is definitely a constant here. You know, since the birth of TV and cinema, the screen is something that represents more than just the TV. It’s something you project yourself onto and lose yourself in – it’s life but not life.

How do you think about the lore for Little Nightmares? It doesn’t feel like you’re building up a universe of literal causal relationships, but we can imagine some players hunting for those more explicit connections.

There’s some very, very deep lore, which I don’t know if we’ll ever [explore fully in a videogame]. Because if you end up telling people everything, that erodes a lot straight away – ‘Oh, I see how everything fits together now.’ It’s dissatisfying. But what people are doing is very natural, which is drawing lines between what they know, with the very small view they have of this world from the two main games. People did it for the first one as well. It was like, ‘The Janitor is Six’s uncle, the Lady is Six’s mum, the Runaway Kid is Seven.’ Because that’s all the information you have, but there’s a whole bunch more people don’t know yet.

In terms of causal links, I’m not a big fan of everyone knowing each other or having lives outside of what you see. Like, the Chefs go home and read recipe books together, or something. I like to think of them as just pure id. They have a singular drive that defines them, it defines how they look, how they behave, what they’re doing in this place, which isn’t a real place, is it? There’s a reason they’re doing what they’re doing, but there isn’t someone twirling their moustache and saying ‘do the next part of my master plan’. It doesn’t work that way. It’s more about nightmare logic. As I say, there’s a colossal lore bible, but it’s [more about following threads] and seeing where it goes and what it becomes. If we were to make another game, or whatever Bandai Namco wants to do with Little Nightmares, there’s this lore to get into and explore.

Is it fair to say that Little Nightmares is essentially a classic children’s story, but zoomed in a bit more, so you can see that some of these treasured stories are innately horrific?

Roald Dahl was one I always came back to, because they were so dark, those stories. I never thought of it [when I was growing up], but there was so much going on in there – it was horrific to have kids reading that stuff. And there were all these very old folk tales, the Grimm fairytales, all these really sad stories were part of our thinking.

But alongside that, it was like, how do kids process the real world? When you throw them into these situations, and ask them to look around and see how adults behave with one another, how they treat one another, what they do to the world – kids are witness to that, and they have to process it, and then how do they survive? You generally give in, don’t you? If you fight against it, or try and be something better than that world, it’s an endless struggle. You’re always fighting to not be consumed by that. And to me, that is one of the strongest themes running through what we’ve done. What does that do to Six in the first game, just being surrounded by parasites? That’s the kind of stuff that we’re thinking of more, rather than just allowing it to be dark. Because, you know, we’re not the first to do that.

Is there any hope in Little Nightmares?

Sure, yeah, because there’s children in there! That’s what we found when we were creating these worlds and these characters – putting a kid in there changes the mix, changes the feeling. It’s not just relentlessly bleak. There’s some sort of glimmer of hope. Even there, though, if you think about how people have reacted to Greta Thunberg, who’s an absolute hero, what she’s putting up with – the vicious slander and venom coming her way when she’s trying to save the planet is crazy. That’s what they’re facing – not just the pressures of living, but also people who don’t want to make things better. It’s amazing that kids like that keep going the way they are.

“If you end up telling people everything, that erodes a lot straight away – ‘Oh, I see how everything fits together now’”