At its best, Little Nightmares is a nail-biting experience which bathes you in tension as you creep through environments past vile creatures and try to work out how to escape with the threat of death looming over your shoulder. At its worst it’s a simple puzzle game which constantly reuses basic mechanics. Luckily Little Nightmares is at its best far more than it is at its worse, and the intriguing and twisted world the developers have created is fascinating, becoming increasingly warped till you reach its shocking conclusion.

2017 Ranked
Indie Recommendations

WIKTOBER WIKTOBER

I've been putting off playing this game for like 6 years now, knowing that I'd like it but just not feeling like playing it.
Not many know this, but I invented the genre of small child in 2d space with platforming and puzzle solving and horrific atmosphere. My name is Jonh Limbo Wiktober .

I love the Nomes and I actually felt tangible warmth each time I hugged them.
I hope they're ok.

I will be playing the sequel to little big nightmares soon.

Infelizmente, Little Nightmares não clicou comigo. O que é bem triste, pois eu vinha com algumas boas expectativas com esse jogo. Não era nada "UAAAU, isso é um jogão", mas esperava pelo menos me divertir de alguma forma...

Tem muitas coisas que me incomodaram profundamente... A jogabilidade das sessões de plataforma é bem imprecisa, falta clareza na comunicação de algumas informações básicas ao jogador, que resulta em muitas vezes eu ter tido que descobrir o que fazer na base da tentativa e erro, e dá uma falsa sensação de liberdade ao jogador de que ele pode escolher possibilidades de resolver os puzzles, mas na verdade essa liberdade não existe. Inclusive, algumas vezes que eu pensei ter conseguido encontrar uma maneira não convencional de resolver um certo puzzle, algo inesperado aconteceu, o jogo bugou e me mostrou uma tela de morte hahaha.

Apesar disso, eu ainda recomendaria esse jogo a pessoas pela arte, ambientação e efeitos sonoros, que são simplesmente maravilhosos e criam uma atmosfera bem imersiva e assustadora, se elas conseguissem ignorar as outras falhas. Os monstros são bem criados, o ambiente é perturbador e encaixa super bem com a trilha e efeitos sonoros. Mas no geral, se você for como eu e se incomodar com os problemas acima, não te recomendo jogar Little Nightmares.

all the involving weight of a great cinematic platformer thrown into horror stealth mostly pervaded by total disempowerment but still allows satisfying flashes of the kind of empowerment u can get from video game stealth (having all the information that the enemy doesnt). too constantly aesthetically compelling and coherent to ignore, with a tightly controlled crescendo that basically never puts a foot wrong...a wonderfully stimulating set of revelations. if perhaps inherently fatphobic DHJSFHFJFHSJ pays off rly memorably with that ending tho !!

Little Nightmare es otro hijo de los "juegos ambientales", esos que su apartado artístico va por un lado y la interactividad por otro. El juego te dice que te pares a ver el diseño de escenarios y personajes pero también te dice que si corres sin mirar atrás te lo pasas todo a la primera. La ambientación es terrorífica y amenazante pero no hay riesgo real, los puzzles no son más que obstáculos inoportunos y los monstruos secuencias con unos patrones muy específicos. Lo que más se alaba es la imaginación de su mundo, y con eso estoy de acuerdo, los diseños son verdaderamente interesantes, pero nada de eso sirve o sirve poco si no viene acompañado con su gameplay. Hasta ahí sería todo, pero Little Nightmare en su afán de ser oscuro y encarnizado presenta en un mundo brutal a unos niños, siendo estos el elemento central, pero no hay nada infantil (en el buen sentido) en él. Little Nightmare te hace una alegoría (poco sutil) de los adultos alimentándose de los niños, pero también usa una referencia al holocausto como un nivel de "el suelo es lava". Little Nightmare tiene por tema principal el hambre, pero no tiene ni idea de que decir al respecto.

So after being totally depressed with dropping BG3 after 20 hours, and swearing off long games for exactly three hours, I decided to give this game a spin. My buddy Parrott suggested it and thought this might help bounce me back a little.

Style over substance here for the most part and I can dig it. The game is very moody, got some nice creep to it. It reminds me a lot of Limbo, which really, that style of game isn't my favorite, but I at least enjoyed the vibe of this one a lot more.

It's a nice short and sweet game with some puzzles. I wish the boss "fights" were a little more creative and they did more with that. But overall a solid time, and I can't complain about the price (free through PS Plus!)

There’s a misconception that “innovation is actually in the indie scene”, this is not without some merit of course, as the triple A landscape is following what seems like the same 12 templates of what they think “good game design” is. But indie games are just as derivative and trend chasing. This doesn’t have to be a negative either, as every once in a while a game comes along that uses current trends well, in Little Nightmare's case, that amounts to a great experience.

Little Nightmares is clearly chasing the 2010s fad of indie horror games having a heavy emphasis on hiding. I personally don’t care for that kind of game play, but given this is presented as a 25.d platformer with (mostly) fixed camera angles, it peaked my interest and I enjoyed my time with it.

The game does a good job of helping you get your bearings. After a brief ten second introductory cut scene that sets up the main antagonist, our MC Six wakes up in a boiler room with leeway to explore every single mechanic. If you see a dark area, you press B to use your lighter to illuminate it, then you’ll see cans and boxes strewn about, which you can pick up with the right trigger and throw, then big boxes and pipes to climb, hide in, and jump on, and finally a long narrow hallway you can use to practice sprinting, this tutorial ends after this room and the game expects you to have memorized all of these basics. In an era where games (aimed at adults especially) have over bearing and over explanatory tutorials that tell you everything, it was refreshing to play a relatively modern game that just let you figure stuff out on your own.

But tutorials often don’t just end with the player figuring out functions, they also have the need to show what the player should expect from the game for the entire experience, or at least give them a good generalized idea. Which is why I want to highlight the first sprinting section.

The game at first makes you think you only need two quick bursts to get past three rooms, but the reality is that the second sprint is one long, continuous one, but it is highly unlikely you will get this on your first attempt. As the room you dash through is a child's bedroom riddled with tons of objects to climb, and other points of interest highlighted in the shadows, which will make you stop and try going somewhere else instead of just the (correct) straight line. This is a brilliant way of communicating to the player to be observant and on edge, which requires them to not act with out thinking, but instead to over think a little while acting, which is great for a horror game. If a developer has a player on auto pilot when playing a horror game for the first time, the level design has failed, good level design in horror games forces the player to over think, and fear making a mistake.

I am not someone who foolishly believes there are games out there with out any kind of pathing, games have always given the player some indication of where to go or what to do next. And Little Nightmares is very good at this aspect. If a surface has juts and grooves, it’s probably climbable, if an object is framed prominently, it’s most likely of some importance, if an area is subtly lit up, you should probably focus on it. None of these are gaudily presented either with some stupid detective vision mechanic or streaks of paint on already bright or lightly colored objects, the game expects you to come to these obvious logical conclusions yourself and that is (sadly) so refreshing.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though when it comes to navigation, there was more than a few times where I got stuck on a lip in floor or a jut on a wall that the fixed angles didn’t do the best job of indicating where there, as the game is more obviously focused on the giants you have to avoid and has to frame them prominently. Some clipping through these lips and juts would have been appreciated, as it would make some set pieces a little less annoying.

When not hiding from the aforementioned giants, you’ll be solving puzzles to progress, these puzzles aren’t mind benders by any means, but they do require some thought to solve and never feel too easy. What makes them fun to figure out is that they play into what ever setting you are in at the moment, you will need to push a suitcase to pull a lever to drop a hide away bed down, or place chunks of meat into a grinder to make a rope of sausages, or close a stove door to make the chef giant panic and clear a path, to list a few examples. This helps the setting of the Maw feel like a character itself that six is exploiting to escape, and makes what could have been banal and mundane in another setting feel much more impactful.

And avoiding each of the giants is mostly a competent affair. Aside from some leeches you’ll run past in chapter 1, the only enemies you will encounter in the game are the giants, and they are designed mostly well enough to enjoy studying how to get past them.

The Janitor clearly had the most effort put into his sections and sets a good impression by being the first one you’ll encounter, with his long, lanky arms, he can catch you quickly and from (mostly) any distance in the room, so you’ll need to have memorized what kind of surfaces you can climb, what boxes and furniture to hide in, and how fast you should be going, given that he is blind and can hear you the second you sprint or push an object over. If you have been paying attention to the contents of the rooms he patrols, you’ll notice he has taken many toys from his victims as trophies. When you do encounter him later, you’ll naturally pick up on the need to throw cymbal monkeys that make noise that he will run over to play with, or turn on a TV with a nursery rhyme that he hyper focuses on. This then culminates into a solid boss encounter where you have to study the movements of his arms until they form a diamond, which indicates you can dash forward and pull two bars from under a door to cut them off. It feels incredibly cathartic to have a brief encounter after spending hours getting stalked and harassed, with said harassers most prominent features being destroyed incredibly fitting penance for his over persistence.

I wish I could lob the same praise to the other three giants, but the game streamlines them heavily in favor of keeping the pacing tight. Not a bad compromise of course, horror games should be short as over familiarity will breed indifference, but I would have liked the Chef encounters to use the kitchen a little more than just closing a stove door as mentioned above, then avoiding broken plates, and finally riding a meat hook while being chased at the end of the chapter (compounded by the final area having the aforementioned annoying lips and juts that you will probably get caught on a few times and end up dying because of it). The majority of the chapter aside from the final section is just hiding from the chefs under furniture or throwing something generic to distract them, and while the great pathing and aesthetics of the kitchen make this fun enough to do, the lack of using the area’s character is disappointing.

And while the next chapter in the restaurant does use the area’s character to some effect, it’s not enough to make up for the annoyances of the guests hit boxes being a little too long which led me to dying a handful of times and essentially had me rolling my eyes and sensibly chuckling at basically having to know exactly where to sprint across the tables speed run style. This could have had the potential of being a good change of pace to being an almost pure reflex section if the chef’s chapter was better, but instead it just compounds how the game trims a little too much fat.

And the last chapter really exemplifies that trimming, you simply push over a vase to get a key, do a brief and easy chase sequence, and then an incredibly bland final boss fight where you hold a mirror in a direction a handful of times, with the end of each sequence causing six to fall down briefly and forcing you wait a bit. It’s a very half assed climax to an otherwise well made game.

I saved talking about this until now cause I really don’t need to go into much detail as to how annoying these kind of sections are in games. At several points through out the game, Six will be struck with hunger, which will trigger a slow walking section. These are meant to make the player feel powerless, but the game proper already does that, Six can not fight back, she only engages in combat twice through out the entire game in the boss fights mentioned above. All these sections do is serve to annoy you and pad out the play time.

The game has a rather hands off approach to story telling and I greatly appreciated it.

The maw its self seems to be a metaphor for cyclical over consumption and the livestock industry, as the corpulent guests that seem to be an analogy for the mega rich can’t help engorging themselves on the bodies of dead humans, and even have no issue being fed the corpses of their own kind to keep themselves sustained, you also have the two chefs who are rather emotionless and indifferent in feeding into this dangerous and horrifically evil hedonism and addiction, and the janitor who works rather well as an allegory for workers who openly abuse livestock due to their perceived low value of life. While the presentation of these themes will be overly blunt for some, the execution is still good when combined with the games excellent art direction and atmosphere, combine this with the fact that the game has no voice acting or dialogue, and it makes this execution all the more effective in getting the player to think about what they experienced.

Visually Little nightmares is fantastic, and it was one of the main reasons I enjoyed it more than I probably would have if it had any other setting.

The first thing that strikes you about the maw is the scale, six is the size of a mouse in comparison to most objects and creatures around her and it makes almost every room feel oppressive and weighty in atmosphere. The lighting is incredible, with points of interest naturally hidden in shadow making you want to investigate to move forward, or moments of darkness having things be outlined just well enough to make you feel even more uneasy, and even when the rooms are brightly lit, there is still several disturbing elements and decorations, macabre paintings of murder and other monsters you never see are almost everywhere, bloody tools are displayed prominently on work benches, kitchen tables are covered in the filth from severed limbs, and so on.

The textures are quite detailed, you’ll have things like patches of rust on filing cabinets, gashes from tools on tables with fine wood, fuzzy rugs where you can count each individual strand of fabric, and lovely wet sheens coating the pipework during the transitional hallways you’ll be running through between chapters.

Then you also have the brilliance of six wearing a bright yellow coat with a distinct and unique diamond shaped hood so that the player never loses track of her when navigating the rooms. It’s clear Tariser studios wanted the visuals to enhance and compliment the game play, and they do a fantastic job at doing so.

Several paragraphs ago I mentioned that the level design its self, from a functional standpoint, is fine, and in most games it would just be ok. The point I am making here though is that even the most simple level design can be made much more enjoyable to solve when developers integrate the aesthetics of the world or tropes of the genre into them. During the janitor chase sequences for example, the fastest way to avoid him is to go through the lowest shelf, but you risk tipping over more objects he has laid there for alarms, meanwhile the safe but long way is to climb up the nearby stack of books to highest shelf. They’re simple solutions yes, but given this is a horror game, where quick pacing but slight over thinking is paramount, having two easy to execute, while still having varying levels of risk, choices to make in the moment, is brilliant. Nowadays many people assume good level design just means “execution of multiple button functions for one problem”, when it’s a broad skill that can implement many approaches.

Lastly on this, it is so refreshing to play a relatively modern game that has influences that aren’t just other video games. One of the many things I dislike about modern video games is that they have seemingly forgot that there are other forms of entertainment out there.

It seems every FPS now is inspired only by Bioshock, halo, or classic doom. It seems like every 3d platformer now is obsessed with having the player just press buttons in the air mario 64 speed run style and only make worlds based on other platformer templates. I could (and will in other reviews) go on about this, but I was so relieved that Little Nightmares’s aesthetic (and story to a small degree) influences were films like Spirited away (there’s homages everywhere, like the scene where Chihiro climbs the stairs or the guests entering the resort, and the Janitor is definitely based on Kamaji) and western horror films like Nightmare on Elm street and session 9 (you will never escape the chair), As someone who counts Spirited Away and Session 9 among his favorite films, this was great for me and fans of all three that I have mentioned will get a lot out of this game because of it. If you are tired of modern games being far too cannibalistic in terms of inspiration, this will be a breath of fresh air for you.

Musically the game is passable. You have your forgettable ambient music that most 2010s video games are so found of that thankfully isn’t intrusive due to the game being so puzzle focused, which is fine as that could be very annoying to players that are stuck. And then there’s the darker ambient tracks that will ramp up in pace when being stalked by one of the giants. If you’ve played an indie horror game in the last 12 years, you’ve heard this all before, really the only impressive thing is your controllers rumble pulsing to the beat when getting chased. Other than that, you certainly won’t be compelled enough to seek out the tracks on their own.


Little Nightmares is a good of example of less being more and taking into account just how much richer and more fulfilling video games used to be, and still can be, when they take influence from non gaming sources. In the hands of other studios, you could assume the game would just be taking cues from nothing but the resident evil remakes and outlast. But that thankfully isn’t the case. It’s a well crafted 5 hour experience that wears its film influences on its sleeves with pride and integrates the character of its world aesthetics and the tropes and needs of its genre into its level design to the full benefit of the medium it’s in. Poor music, the awful slow walking sections, and the over truncation of the last two chapters aside, it’s one of the better modern games I have played in a very long time.

8/10.

Writing this review because it's one of my favorite games of all time. I already played it on release and replayed it this year again.

I can't recommend this game enough. The story & lore are amazing, both are silent and more show than tell, the game lets the players think about it for themselves what could actually be going on. It has amazing visuals and the art and style of not only the characters but also the scenery is simply stunning. I also really like the soundtrack. I find myself keep coming back to it. Little Nightmares shows perfectly that a main character doesn't need to talk to make you feel connected to them. One of the most interesting, immersive and visually beautiful games I've ever played. Little Nightmares is an experience that everyone needs to experience honestly!

⌚ Time to finish - 3 hours 45 minutes
🤬Difficulty - easy

🔊 Soundtrack - There isn't too much music. But the sounds they have creates an excellent atmosphere. One of the strengths of this game.
🌄Graphics – pleasant to look at.
🌦 Atmosphere – Excellent atmosphere. Tense at times, mysterious, made me feel all kinds of feelings like fear, disgust, startled etc. But nothing to give me a heart attack, or cheap scare tactics.
📚 Main Story / Characters – Light on story but what was there created a sense of mystery. I liked it.
🤺 Combat –None
🧭 Side Activities / Exploration – None apart from collectibles etc. I didn't even know these existed till half way through the game when i randomly stumbled on them. Wish it was clearer so i could have collected more from the beginning.
🚗 Movement/Physics – Ok. There are some clunky controls. I don't understand why, there is a grab button for ledges, ladders. Should just auto grab those w/jump, while grab is for environmental objects like boxes. Some jumps felt imprecise. Expect a few deaths from clunky controls.
📣 Voice acting – Not much

📝 Review:

This was a good game. The puzzles weren't too hard but the atmosphere and story is what made me want to keep playing it. It did feel like it ended abruptly but that's fine its a short game. There is DLC and part 2 to go through which I will go through. I feel in these sort of games, Inside was far better.

💡Final Thoughts:

No reason not to play this game if you are into things like Limbo/Inside/Gris etc.

Definitely worth playing even if its not topping its genre. It provides enough here to make you feel involved, gripped, and generally not a chore to continue and finish.

I enjoyed it enough want to play the DLC and sequel.

Idk if it's coherent enough to be called its own subgenre, but atmospheric-horror-platformer-inspired-by-Limbo was definitely a thing in the 2010s. Little Nightmares is luckily better than Limbo thanks to its richer setting and story, and art design that draws on the grotesque caricatures of stop-motion animation and the more surreal works of Miyazaki to create a world approximating what I imagine a horror movie made by Studio Ghibli would feel like. So all of that is pretty rad. The game itself is...eh. Like Limbo, this is pretty much a cinematic experience dressed up as an interactive one. I mean, it is what it is, and works well enough as a game, but I guess I feel like the best and most essential parts of Little Nightmares could be condensed into an hour-long animated film, and you would not necessarily lose a great deal in translation. Or, to put it another way, this is an ideal Let's Play game—watching someone else play it is pretty darn close to the experience of playing it yourself.

Enjoyment - 7/10
Difficulty - 4/10

An unnerving adventure through a horrifying world as a little person decked with an awesome yellow raincoat. Run away from big ugly baddies before they get you. This game is the childhood fear of the dark, especially when you go downstairs for a midnight snack.
🏆

The fear of the unknown is famously the oldest and strongest emotion of all, so if the goal is to make a horror game, why directly present a plot? It may sound like a nonsequitur, but a plot contextualizes everything a player does, making the horrifying unknowns of their situation much more plainly understandable. Without getting a story explained in this way, players are left guessing and can’t take anything for granted, and this “show don’t tell” approach is what Little Nightmares uses to establish its world. All that players know in the beginning is that they’re a kid in a raincoat, but even that much isn’t guaranteed with how far out the camera is in cinematic platformers like these. That sort of distance is great at pulling the background into the foreground of the player’s mind, highlighting the details that constitute the bulk of the storytelling. It’s soundly constructed in theory, but this only contributes to the quality of the presentation, not of the plot itself. This is where Little Nightmares falters, in the actual narrative being presented through its wordless surreality. If a story is going to be told in such a way, it would be best to think of it like a picture book, where everything the player needs to know can be reasonably learned from key images, but this is where that theory of effective horror becomes difficult. On one hand, keeping these grounding details sparse can help preserve the mystery, but a lack of context can also lead to detachment, and of only understanding events in abstract. There’s a balance to strike, where enough should be given to where the stakes are understood, but the rest should be left in speculative shadow. The hallmark of effective surreality is confronting the audience with a sort of Socratic paradox, instilling the knowledge of how little they know and of all the horrific implications that may entail, not just leaving people confused or unfulfilled. Unfortunately, that's a balance the game wasn't able to strike, and confusion was my main takeaway in spite of the imaginative imagery and promising design concept. It’s unique enough to where I wouldn’t dissuade people from trying it, but it’s hard to recommend a game that’s only good in theory.

I have to admit that I've never cared much for "Limbo-likes"—I thought Gris was just okay, I thought Inside was worse, and Little Nightmares (hi!) was bad enough that I bounced off it 1 hour into its 2-hour long runtime about 2 years ago. Last night, I felt like I was finally at the point where I could return to Little Nightmares with an open mind. Maybe I was just too harsh on it! But Little Nightmares is bad in so potent and specific a way I feel the need to place it among my narrow list of 1/10s, mostly as a symbolic venture. This is partially because I hated my time with this game, and partially to hit both "Art Games" (Not artsy games. I love artsy shit. I am talking about games which make "being art" the end goal) and "Game Theory/YouTuber Games" (games made primarily to be consumed secondhand, through lets plays and theory videos) with one fell swoop.

These sorts of cinematic platformers strike me as particularly emblematic of a certain era of games which proliferated in the early-to-mid 2010s. Around the end of the 2000s, Roger Ebert alongside some other well-respected art/film/whatever critics I can't remember now got into a lot of gamer's heads with their proclamations that "Video Games are not only not art, but can never be art." Clearly, some of these gamers were also gamedevs who quickly got hell-bent on proving them wrong. What this brought was the Art Game™—games which cared first and foremost about being unquestionably, without a doubt, “art.”

The problem with Art Games™ is both that they’re compromises, and that they're bundled with implications that Not all games are art, just the artsy ones. You will never convince someone that video games are art if you just show them a movie or a painting with menial gameplay stapled to it. As much as I like narrative-heavy walking sims, they’re a pretty shit argument for Video Games being art—anyone who may be convinced by its quality can just as easily continue to write off games by calling walking sims “interactive fiction” or some other label.

The best arguments for Games as Art are games which utilize the medium they’re in instead of trying to copy something else. Back when film started truly rolling in the early 1900s, tons and tons of early works were just adaptations of theater pieces (and many more stuck one static camera past the fourth wall and did nothing else with it)—but the films that are remembered in the annals of history are the ones which chose to use the medium to its fullest. Games have been going through a similar growing period for decades—you can go back pretty far and find good examples of intertwined gameplay and story, but we still see plenty of games obsessed with being movies instead of games. Team Silent nailed the concept of “frictional gameplay” as early as the turn of the millennium (intentionally or not), but it probably wasn’t too much of a crazy idea to say “hey, let’s take the camp out of Resident Evil and use this weird clunky gameplay to do more than amp up the scares!” I guarantee there are more examples even earlier on, but you’ll have to forgive my lack of experience with pre-PS2 games, I just haven't tried much from then aside from platformers and JRPGs.

I’m getting off track, but my point is that the worst time for these sorts of games which placed their express priorities on "Being Art" above all else, was in the early 2010s, and that period of time left us with the popularization of at least a couple of genres. One of these being the aforementioned “Limbo-like”, which is just one specific style of a genre which has come to be known as the “cinematic platformer” (a name which feels just a little bit self-incriminating). I’ve yet to play Ico or Oddworld or any of the ones that came before Limbo and Journey, but my current opinions of the genre are not very high. Gris controls better than most, and its music and environments make it a place that is at least neat to exist within, but its representations of depression are pretty passé. Stray is predictable at every turn, but at least it has the novelty of controlling a cat. For a while I considered Inside to be my least favorite—sluggish and, generally, “Not Fun” movement extending basic puzzles far past their needed length was really bad, but at least the last 15 or 20 minutes of that were kinda cool. As of now the only Cinematic Platformer I have had a pretty good experience with was J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, but that’s probably because most of its story is told through text logs, which is pretty nonstandard with how "show don't tell" these "cinematic platformers" often are.

I have nothing positive to say about Little Nightmares. The movement here is even worse than it was on Inside, and the puzzles are even more trite, generally just consisting of finding an object and bringing it to some place. I have almost always hated stealth in games when it’s included (since it’s always just “go sit in this corner or in this shadow and wait for this guy to slowly walk past as you feel the minutes left on your life slowly draining away”), but stealth is here too!

One could argue that this is intentional, that this is being done to enhance the dread and horror, but I’m sorry, this game is just not scary. It’s scary enough for YouTubers to react to it and pull grossed out faces into their webcams. It’s scary enough for JackSepticEye to play and scream “Oh My God!” When an arm pops up when you’re in a vent. But anyone even marginally acquainted with some of the canonized Creepypastas will find basically everything here overplayed. The stakes are not established and it simply uses existing horror imagery with the hopes that your memory of something similar scaring you in a different work will continue to scare you this time. And again, even if it was scary, the problem a lot of horror games face is the inability to instill a fear of death once you die once. More complicated games can take your items or ramp up the difficulty to make dying a real and continuous threat, but Cinematic Platformers are far too simple for that, and the most they can do is waste a bit of your time. And waste your time Little Nightmares does! Every time you die, you have to watch a slow respawn cutscene, which serves as the only real punishment for failure. This is not threatening, this is annoying. If you try to run on a thin beam, (which the game has you do a couple of times), chances are you will fall off and have to do it again. You cannot shmove your way past enemies, you must stealth them. Which again, is fine for the sort of game this is, but only if it’s scary! Playing the same stock horror strings literally everything else in the world uses over an ugly caricature moving in a weird way is not scary! This can work with more context, context about who you are and who these enemies are, but this is not given—the chefs are about as well-developed as the Goombas in a Mario game. It doesn’t matter. None of this shit matters.

And all of this, ALL of this--I could excuse if there was a point behind it. Kane & Lynch 2 sucks to play and you can't root for anyone and it crashes all the time but I love it because it has something to say, and the miserable experience of attempting to play it in the first place adds to that, intentionally or not. The extent of what Little Nightmares has to say, is the same as any other forgettable YouTuber horror game. I mean, at least Sonic.EXE and Garten of Banban are fucking quick! Both of those, in and out within 10 minutes. But Little Nightmares has no good scares and nothing interesting to say, and it meanders around for 2 or 3 hours while doing it. It's vague enough that plenty of people have Rorschach'ed their way into thinking they know what it means (just on this page, I've seen someone thinking it's about Capitalism), but Little Nightmares shrouds its self in abstractions and vague details because it has nothing to say. It is made in a post-Game Theory era, where artistic intention is not embedded within a text, but vague indicators leading towards intention are left for theory videos to pick up. I think they just made a creepypasta game, man.

Little Nightmares has nothing of interest to say, and no interesting way of communicating it. It is not fun, or scary, or entertaining, or interesting. There was not a single minute when I was playing Little Nightmares where I was not irritated, or bored, or feeling like my time was being wasted. I have to admit that I've never cared much for "Limbo-likes"—but Little Nightmares is without a doubt the worst one I have ever played.