Little Nightmares review – Creepy, but shallow
Being a kid, when you haven’t yet figured out what’s real and what isn’t, is equal parts magical and terrifying. The imaginary creatures that live under your bed might as well be real. Strangers all look weird – they’re not mom, and not-mom is terrifying – and even your own home can have unfamiliar areas and dark corners.
That’s where Little Nightmares starts: the terrifying experience that is being a child in an adult’s world. From there, the game attempts to tell a story about hunger, greed, and youth through a beautifully-realized but deeply-macabre world.
You play as a young girl named Six, trying to escape a massive structure called The Maw, a creaking hunk of steel and wood that seems to be afloat somewhere in the ocean. As you explore and ascend, you’ll encounter adults – always adults – who seem to feel that you’d be better off dead or, better yet, in their stomachs. Your options of escape include running, jumping, and hiding, as well as a lighter to help brighten the darkest corners of this little world.
Handmade horror
Little Nightmares is like a stop-motion movie come to life. The art direction and animation are easily the best parts of the game, and it seems clear to me that this is where developer Tarsier Studios put most of their attention.
Those stop-motion creations, like the 2009 film Coraline, animation by the Quay Brothers, or that string of amazing Tool videos in the 90s, all share a certain grimy quality to them that other animated movies don’t. Watching them move, you can tell the characters have been touched by a human hand. And yet, they still feel like living things.
That’s how Little Nightmares feels. Despite being a game, the whole thing feels like someone literally held it.
The creatures that inhabit The Maw – I hesitate to call them human – have an unsettling liveliness to them. While the protagonist, Six, feels like a person, these characters, like the Janitor or the Butchers, feel animated, as if something brought them to life and gave them a purpose aboard the ship.
The environments these beings move around in feel lived in, endlessly so, with countless drawers and shelves filling the background alongside frames filled with rotting art. Doors are boarded, and empty rooms show signs of activities abandoned mid-stream. All of this made Little Nightmares worth exploring to some degree. Tarsier’s art team has crafted a gorgeous world, water-logged, rotting, and creaking. Like a zombie, it’s always falling apart, but never actually collapses.
The genius use of sound helps this along. Little Nightmares is a quiet game, so when there is sound, like the sound of restaurant patrons gorging themselves on meat, it’s effective and chilling. There’s just enough sound to keep tension high for most of the game.
The wrong kind of twisted
Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/reviews/little-nightmares-review/