Little Nightmares

Out now | PC, PS4, Xbox One

Best known for its work on the fluffy, happy LittleBigPlanet series, Swedish indie Tarsier Studios has conjured a deliciously dark, cracked-mirror counterpart. Perhaps Little Nightmares’ greatest strength is how little it looks like a traditional videogame: there are no tooltips, no health or stamina meters, no telltale shimmer on important objects. It’s more like an interactive stop-motion animation (imagine Tim Burton and Laika collaborating on a remake of The City Of Lost Children) minus the jerkiness, but with a similar sense of physicality. Each room feels like a handcrafted diorama, and that tactility only makes the horrors that follow all the more potent.

You play as a tiny, desperately undernourished girl named Six, who awakes to find herself in the grimy underbelly of The Maw, an underwater resort catering to grotesque elites. It’s an intimidating place, but the consistently arresting, thoughtful mise en scène – the scaling of objects and environments warped by its young protagonist’s vivid imagination – pulls

you onward. An early scene chillingly establishes the kind of puzzles you’ll encounter: Six noisily drags a chair to reach a door handle, as two lifeless legs dangle from the top of the screen.

The environmental puzzles are simple, but complicated by the presence of adult pursuers, from a blind janitor with Mr. Tickle-like arms that ensure no hiding place feels truly safe, to two elephantine chefs, whose guttural grunts and roars will have you cowering in the shadows. As you climb to The Maw’s upper decks, you’ll discover the punters it services are even worse: one ravenous visitor, his porcine features smeared with food and spittle, shrieks and shoves aside his table with terrifying force, slithering after you like the world’s fattest zombie. For its final movement, Tarsier brilliantly downshifts, essaying a subtler, quieter brand of scare: an insistent, unsettling melody provides a creepy soundtrack, but it’s the moment it suddenly stops that gives you the shivers.

As a mood piece, it’s masterful. But the story stumbles. A recurring motif that sees Six forced into increasingly extreme measures for sustenance culminates in predictably grim fashion. And if its reticence to give anything away is part of its appeal, it can lead to moments of directionlessness. Still, this resourceful, rich indie horror stays true to its title: see it through to the bitter end and you’ll probably want to sleep with the lights on. Chris Schilling