Little Nightmares
Developed by: Tarsier Studios
Published by: Bandi Namco Entertainment
Available on: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
In the mid-aughts, I read a number of posts on video game message boards about the health of the side-scrolling platformer. Many felt that the genre was being eclipsed by first-person perspective or three-dimensional games. So, when the Danish studio Playdead released “Limbo” in 2010, people took notice. The game overturned a number of conventions, ditching the sparkling colors associated with games made by Nintendo and their competitors for a black-and-white look that harkened back to the days of silent film. It also replaced the spunky hero, personified by Mario and Sonic, with a boy who exuded a sense of physical vulnerability. Dismemberment was always just a misstep away. If platforming games had previously felt like odysseys across dangerous playgrounds, Playdead showed how the genre could benefit by wringing inspiration from dark fairy tales.
Now, Swedish developer Tarsier Studios has followed suit with “Little Nightmares,” a game about an ingenious nine-year-old girl named Six. She is surrounded by droopy-skinned people who’d love nothing more than to catch, cook, and serve her to a gluttonous clientele. The first couple of times I played the game, it was in very short spurts. I was a bit irked by how much the game seemed to have appropriated a style that I associated with Playdead. But after I decided to play through it, my reservations slipped away, leading me to recall T.S. Eliot’s observation about influence: “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” “Little Nightmares” is a more well-paced game than “Limbo,” and less surreal, more fairy-tale like, than “Inside,” Playdead’s masterpiece.
At the start of the game, a kimono-clad woman appears among a bank of shadows, then Six startles awake. From her resting place on top of an open suitcase, she stands up in room with a leaky ceiling. Blurry pictures taped on the inside of the suitcase and the pendulous movement of the environment around her, create the (false) impression that Six is a stowaway on a ship. Things quickly grow odd when she spots a group of gnomes fleeing from her. With the press of a button, Six can use a zippo lighter to illuminate her way. This is useful when she comes across a steel hatch that opens onto an unlit tunnel. Crawling through it that takes her to a platform that opens into a cavernous area that’s spanned by staircase. As Six makes her way up the stairs, the camera pulls out to show chains, like high overhanging telephone wires, stretching across the opposite areas. The effect is subtly disorienting since it is difficult to grasp the dimensions of the place, which calls to mind one of the essential design points of “Inside.”
Not long after Six crosses the other side of the stairs, she finds a room in which a man has hanged himself. You get a good taste of the game’s macabre sensibility from the fact that Six must move the chair that the hanged man stepped off to a door so that she can reach the handle to open it.
Over the five chapters of the game, Six must elude detection from the staff and guests at the infernal resort that she finds herself trapped in. Compounding her plight are periodic hunger pangs which drive her to desperation, leading to some of the game’s most arresting scenes. “Little Nightmares” features a good number of chase sequences that are tense and not overextended. The enemies are cartoonishly grotesque, like something Pixar might have created if they wanted to petrify children instead of amuse them. Though small in number, they are memorable as are some of the background details like the bathrooms with toilet bowls nudged together which reminded me of the memorable communal bathroom scene from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film “The Phantom of Liberty.” As with Playdead’s games, the sound design is gracefully minimalistic.
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“Little Nightmares” is a taut game that is creepy and atmospheric. It doesn’t extend the margins of video game aesthetics so much as grow the market for dark, video game fairy tales. At present, I’m fine with that.
Share this articleShareChristopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer who has been playing video games since the days of the Atari 2600. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Barnes & Noble Review, Al Jazeera America, the Guardian and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.
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