Little Nightmares does a great job of instilling a sense of scale wherein you the player feel puny and powerless. the gloomy atmosphere is pitched really well but there are issues with environmental legibility (at least on my crappy TV). this means you end up redoing sequences over and over to the point that the emotional impact is drained. worse is how inconsistent it can be - spent an evening trying to climb onto something that seemed the obvious route forward, got frustrated, gave up. reloaded the game and it worked first time. i don't know what to call that other than "betrayal".

unlike Resi Evil, which is pretty committed to keeping the action and puzzle sequences separate, Little Nightmares main game-mode is time-limited action-puzzles, which means a lot of the game feels like doing a Crystal Maze challenge. except when the time runs out, you watch a child die and have to try it again.

i liked it but wish it had been technically tighter and less cinematically focused.

a lot to love here, the mysteries spun throughout are enough to keep one poking at the nooks and crannies of Nivalis until the game's end, but the lo-fi presentation may be too much for many. the blocky environments are fantastic, it looks really stylish and they really went hard on weather effects, particles etc. to great effect. however, the roblox action figure characters are difficult to appreciate. unfortunately, the narrative choices don't have weighty consequences and the main story thread comes to a fairly abrupt end without much of a build up, the side stories and characters are far more memorable. many systems introduced do nothing (i don't think the buff items did anything at all).

i think a dystopian story where moral choices have near-zero consequence could be an interesting artistic decision but here it feels like limitation somewhere. it's feels great to drive the HOVA around and enjoy the vibe but that won't be enough for most people.