This place – with its nurseries full of restlessly sleeping children, curious packages transported by hook, and some truly disgusting visitors – is grotesquely functional. It’s lit like a haunted house, regularly forcing you to flick open Six’s only possession, a tiny cigarette lighter – but it’s more terrifying for not being abandoned.
The Maw itself is something like the world’s worst doll’s house, the front walls wrenched away and its themed rooms built to absurd dimensions – made to reflect a small child’s view of a giant, adult world. Six is trespassing on their property – the sense that they know the lay of the land in a way you don’t is overwhelming. I don’t recall a single jump scare in the entirety of Little Nightmares’ runtime, but I know I yelped as a butcher wheezed and stooped to check under the greasy workbench I was hiding beneath, or as something chased me through a room neck-deep with shoes (an admittedly uneasy callback to Holocaust imagery). You know where your predators are and what they can potentially do to you at almost all times – you’re more worried about them knowing where you are. All that’s left to do is creep past, outsmart them using the room around you or, most horrifying of all, realise there’s no fight, only flight, and be forced to simply run past in the hope they can’t catch you.ĭeveloper Tarsier doesn’t shy away from showing them in their full, grim glory. Each owns a stretch of the rooms you need to pass through and, as you’re forced to watch their grim (if oddly mundane) business in hiding, each teach you a little more about just how bad a situation Six is in. Getting to know why Six is… the way she is (I’ll say no more on that) feels as though it would have added to the experience, rather than ruining any mystique.Ī nightmarish custodian who literally sniffs you out as his hideously long arms feel their way towards your hiding place twin butchers, fattened and deformed by god knows what the ghoulishly beautiful woman in kabuki dress that haunts Six’s dreams. It must be said that, where Playdead’s blank stories encourage debate about metaphor and meaning, Little Nightmares’ wordless style is a little harder to swallow when the story seems more straightforward. It’s quietly masterful (not least for a studio releasing its first original game) and never more so than in the giant, twisted figures of those trying to stop you proceeding.
Every enemy, every room, every meat grinder you use to make a rope of sausages to swing from, contributes to the story of The Maw and Six’s seeming breakout. Little Nightmares’ closest relatives are Playdead’s exemplary Limbo and Inside, not just because of its faint glee at the idea of a child in mortal peril, but in how cleverly it braids together puzzle design and storytelling.