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.
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.
Reviewed on Apr 11, 2023