Little Nightmares II
LITTLE NIGHTMARES I I is a horror fan’s dream come true.
Tarsier Studios’ Little Nightmares II is a horror game which understands modern horror in ways most games haven’t wrapped their heads around. The Babadook, Midsommar, Hereditary… these iconic modern films have eschewed jump scares in favor of slowly building chills, unsettling atmosphere, and a constant sense of dread. Little Nightmares II, much like its predecessor, laces all of these feelings through its gameplay while others in the genre are still focusing on things that go bump in the night.
Speaking of wrapping your head around things, Little Nightmares II serves up what I’m pretty sure, even early on as we are, will be my biggest videogame chill of the year. In Little Nightmares II, you play as a small boy trying to make his way through a world full of oversized, horrific looking grown-ups, and one of these grown-ups is a strict, elderly school teacher. That already sounds scary, so imagine my terror when her neck starts to slither out from her shoulders with a deeply sinister twitch. Eventually, it becomes a little overused, and loses its sting, but the game always seems to know when a monster’s terror has become diluted, and shuffles them out for a new, often more horrific, beast.
Even when the game over-eggs it a bit, you have to give it credit for how much variation it squeezes into levels which, at first glance, seem incredibly similar. It’s hard to find a screenshot which doesn’t have a greyish-blue hue, deliberately underlit, with one small glow around the player character and something lumpy looming in the shadowy background. Just looking at the images in isolation, you’d be forgiven for thinking the art style would get old after a while. However, thanks to some intelligent level design puzzles and a relatively short runtime, it never really does.
This is helped by the fact the set pieces are so strange and compelling that they become the center of attention. As well as the snakenecked school teacher, there’s an old horror staple in the walls of grabbing hands, as well as a bizarre puzzle where you need to find different chess piece toppers to complete the set. The king’s topper, rather than the wooden ornament, is instead a—possibly once living—puppet boy, slumped over the chess piece, eyes closed, limbs roped in place, with a small, yellow crown on his noggin.
Even the more elaborate puzzles never get too frustrating
DON’T LOOK NOW
It’s tempting to keep talking about Little Nightmares II’s visuals, but while the aesthetics do play a big part in elevating the game’s inherent creepiness, the gameplay doesn’t just exist to lead you from one scene to the next. It offers very little instruction or handholding (apart from the literal handholding mechanic with your partner, Six), but that suits the eerie tones, and such trust in the player is welcome.
For being a 2.5 platformer, Little Nightmares II makes the most of open spaces. You can wander off into the background, finding collectibles or Easter eggs nestled away. There are still limits to this—the camera remains fixed, and eventually you’ll hit an invisible wall—but it makes the levels feel more like actual places and not like simple A to B throughlines, as some sections can feel like in other sidescrollers.
While exploration makes the levels more expansive than they initially appear to be, the puzzles often happen in small, truncated spaces. This makes it much easier to explore every nook and cranny for that hidden key, that secret lever, that solution satanically scrawled on the wall in erratic chalk markings. As a result, even the more elaborate ones never get too frustrating, because you always know the solution is here somewhere, you just have to find it.
Unfortunately, whether it happens in big spaces or small spaces, the combat is pretty bad. Thankfully, it’s used sparingly, but if you ever have to fight your way out of a situation, prepare to be endlessly frustrated. That’s because all the melee weapons you’re provided with are too big for you, so you have to drag them across the floor, heave them up, then crash them down. Trying to get the timing right is tricky. Little Nightmares II gets most things right, but the combat is a swing and a (very slow) miss.