At the center of the game’s most harrowing moments are these monstrosities, and in these moments are some of the most tense experiences I’ve endured in quite some time. What makes this journey for freedom as terrifying as it proves to be is the cast of nightmarish and deformed monstrosities you will have to evade, tread carefully around, and sometimes desperately sprint through. Alas, I didn’t use the lighter much, a credit to the magic done with lighting in the game.
However, in Little Nightmares, the menacing shadows aren’t of your mum’s elliptical bike, but of some demented, monster-human thing trying to kill you. Despite the casted light sometimes morphing ordinary objects into things of shadowy terror, it was better than tip-toeing through uncertainty. However, more often than not I found myself enduring the darkness and the hazards that potentially could fall upon me within it rather than turn on the lighter which casted long, twisting shadows and distorted things in spine-chilling ways.Īs a young kid I would travel with a flashlight if it was dark. It’s good for lighting up some of the wet and darker areas of the game, like cramped crawl spaces. Notably, Six carries around a lighter that you can flick open at your leisure. It felt like it earned the terror that progressively seeped out of me as I played it, where many games would have just gone for the shock-factor. This, in part, is why I enjoyed Little Nightmares so much. You know, the one’s that plague the horror genre? However, I do like being haunted and subtly being coerced into a state of fear and anxiety rather than having it forced out of me with a quick pop.
Actually, let me rephrase that: I don’t like mini heart attack inducing jump scares. Rather, Little Nightmares subtly unnerves you with clever visual and audio work and chest-tightening cat-and-mouse gameplay. What developer Tarsier has created is more of a psychological thriller than a horror game: there is no overdone and cheap jump scares or unduly amounts of gore for the sake of gore, and better yet there are none of the usual pitfalls that make horror games predictable and trite. Little Nightmares is a tight, atmospherically charged, and eerie experience that swallows you up at the start of the game and never quite fully spits you out even when you’re done playing it.
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