Little Nightmares
Little Nightmares is a puzzle-platformer horror adventure game developed by Tarsier Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Stadia. The game received positive reviews upon release with critics praising the atmosphere, graphics, and sound. Criticism was aimed at the game's checkpoint system.
A sequel, Little Nightmares 2, has been announced for a 2020 release, featuring Six and a new character called Mono.
Gameplay
Plot
A little girl named Six, dressed in a yellow raincoat, awakens from a dream of a woman resembling a Geisha. Armed with only a lighter, she sneaks through the bowels of the Maw, a massive iron vessel designed for much larger inhabitants. Throughout the Maw, she encounters several Nomes, small, skittish creatures that either flee her or passively observe her efforts. Through the Prison, where captured children are held, she evades carnivorous leeches that infest its depths and a pair of artificial eyes that will turn her to stone should she be caught in their lights.Six regularly experiences crippling bouts of hunger. On the first of these instances, another child gives her a piece of bread to eat. She is then captured by the blind, long-armed Janitor when he lures her into a cage with a piece of meat. She escapes but makes no effort to help the other children. She then falls into a room filled with piles of shoes and evades the unseen monster burrowing underneath. The Janitor eventually pursues Six into an elevator, where she severs his arms with the collapsing door.
Caught by another bout of hunger, Six is forced to eat a live rat which has been caught in a mousetrap. Via a conveyor belt, she travels to the Kitchen, where children wrapped up in paper are being sent. Here, the grotesque Twin Chefs are preparing a large feast and attempt to add Six to their recipe whenever she enters their line of sight. She escapes and makes her way outside, to the hull of the Maw, above the ocean waves.
Scaling the hull, Six witnesses a procession of obese, suited Guests from their vessel into the mouth of the Maw. They lumber into the Japanese-style dining hall, where they gorge themselves on red meat and wine. This feast is overseen by the mysterious Lady—the masked, Geisha-like woman from Six’s dream. Noticing Six, several guests scramble after her, but she escapes. When she has another hunger attack, a friendly Nome offers her a sausage. However, having seen where the meat comes from, Six eats the Nome instead. As she does so, a shadowy, flickering vision of herself looks on.
Via an elevator, Six follows the Lady up into her Quarters, which are strewn with broken mirrors. The Lady takes notice of Six and pursues her through a dark corridor. Six finds an unbroken mirror, which she uses to repel the Lady when she tries to ambush her from the shadows. The sight of her own reflection causes the Lady pain and finally subdues her and knocks off her mask. As the Lady lies defenseless, Six approaches her and experiences a final hunger attack. She bites into the Lady’s neck, killing her and absorbing her magical powers.
Six walks back through the dining area, surrounded by a shadowy aura. The Guests try to eat her, but their lives are instantly drained by her new powers. She passes through a door with an eye encrusted in it and proceeds up a staircase and out into the sunlight, while some Nomes wait behind at the open doorway.
In the post-credits scene, Six is seen sitting by the entrance of the Maw waiting to be rescued while a foghorn is heard in the distance; implying that a ship is coming her way, or a new shipment of hungry guests are about to arrive for their stay at the Maw.
Secrets of the Maw
A trio of DLC levels that offer a "different perspective on Six’s adventures" were planned. The first one was released in July 2017, the second in November 2017 and the last in February 2018.The Depths
A young boy, known as the Runaway Kid, wakes up from a nightmare involving him swimming in darkness before being dragged underwater. After leaving the Nursery, he spots the Janitor chasing one of the escaping children. The Kid follows a girl who is also fleeing, but she disappears and leaves her flashlight behind, which the Kid takes.The Kid finds himself in the Depths of the Maw, which are heavily flooded and he has to avoid Leeches and make his way across by hopping on floating platforms. The Depths turn out to be the home of the Granny, who swims underwater and attempts to grab the Kid either by bumping and destroying the platforms he stands on or snatching him if he is in the water for too long. After pushing a television set into the water to electrocute and kill the Granny, the Kid makes his way to a tall wooden staircase with light coming through the top. He then reaches a ladder and climbs it, pushing through a grate. However, the light turns out to be a flashlight and he is caught by the Janitor and dragged into the darkness. The final scene shows the Kid in a cage next to other cages with children, including Six. The Janitor's long arms reach out and grab the Kid's cage and pull it off screen, paralleling Six's campaign just before she wakes up in the cage.
The Hideaway
The second DLC chapter is titled "The Hideaway" and features the Kid and the Nomes. It starts with the Kid escaping from the paper he is wrapped in, which is ascending on a hook towards the Kitchen, and he falls to a new level of the Maw. With the help of the Nomes that he finds along the way, he finds an engine room where the Nomes are brought to throw coal in the furnace. One of the rooms in the area has a similar viewing machine as in the Lair, where the Kid can see places where Six has been, and he even witnesses Six herself treading through the room of shoes. During this campaign, the Kid also encounters the Janitor. After finding all the Nomes and bringing them to the engine room to help power up the furnace, the large bucket elevator in the back of the engine room becomes fully functional, ultimately lifting the Kid up to where the Nomes are gathered, presumably the "Hideaway". Then, after leaving through a crack in the wall, the Kid eventually finds himself on a rising platform, which is the top of an elevator where the Lady is standing.The Residence
The chapter starts at the top of the elevator where the Lady was at the end of the Hideaway. In this campaign, the Kid finds himself in the Lady's Residence, eventually finding a room with several statues of the Lady. After solving puzzles to find three missing statues while fighting off the Shadow Children and eluding an Eye, he finds the Lady looking at herself in a mirror, her face in the reflection revealed to be gruesome and deformed, possibly explaining why she wears a mask. In the last room of the Residence, the Lady captures the Kid and transforms him into a Nome. He then finds his way to the Guest Area and to the room with the sausage in Six's story. The chapter ends with the Kid standing by the sausage, indicating that it is him who Six eats. When the credits for the Secrets of the Maw roll, they are eventually shown on a television set, after which the screen shows a figure reminiscent of the Hanging Man.Very Little Nightmares
A mobile app titled Very Little Nightmares was announced in April 2019 and was released in May 2019 on iOS. The story acts as a prequel to Little Nightmares.Plot
A young girl, known as “The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat”, wakes up in the Nest, a large mansion that resides on a tall, narrow island, and attempts to find a way out. Along the way, she encounters Six from the original game; Nomes ; the long-armed, wheelchair-bonded Craftsman; the crunching, handcuffed Butler, who has telekinetic powers; an unseen monster that lives under a large sea of garbage; and the Pretender, a young gray-haired girl, who is the owner of the Nest. Upon reaching the first floor, the Girl accidentally breaks one of the Pretender's dolls made from the bodies of the captured children, leading the Pretender to yell for the Butler as she runs out of the Nest. The Girl is then chased out of the Nest by the Butler and with Six's help, escapes into a shed on the other side of the island, but unknowingly locks Six out, mistaking her for the Butler. The Girl finds the Pretender crying over the doll that the Girl broke, who, upon seeing the Girl, gives chase. At one point, the Girl saves Six from falling down a cliff. The Girl is then cornered by the Pretender, but is saved when Six drops a boulder on her pursuer. The Pretender, who was unharmed by the boulder's impact, leaps at the Girl, causing them both to fall into the ocean where they presumably drown. The story ends with the Girl's raincoat emerging from the ocean and Six climbing down the island to escape. It is implied that Six recovered the Girl's raincoat, which she later wears in Little Nightmares.Development
The game was originally announced by Tarsier Studios in May 2014 under the title Hunger, with no known publisher for release on PlayStation 4. After a teaser trailer in February 2015, nothing was heard of the project until August 2016, when Bandai Namco Entertainment announced that they had entered into a worldwide publishing agreement with Tarsier for the project, which was now re-titled Little Nightmares.Reception
Little Nightmares received "generally positive" reviews, according to video game review aggregator Metacritic.Cory Arnold said on Destructoid "Little Nightmares hypnotized me with ever-present suspense," and awarded it a score of 8.5/10.
Jonathan Leack from Game Revolution gave the game a score of 3 out of 5 stars saying that "Little Nightmares appears to have a double meaning. On one hand, the gameplay is a nightmare, regularly testing your patience and will to push forward. On the other, the atmosphere and audio design prove terrifying in a way that horror fiends will admire. There's an equal amount of qualities to like and dislike, but when it comes down to it Little Nightmares succeeds at delivering on its promise of being an interesting horror game unlike anything else."
Sam Prell of GamesRadar+ awarded it 4 out of 5 stars stating that "At times mechanically clumsy, but artistically sound, Little Nightmares might get on your nerves every once in awhile, but its imagery will burrow into your brain and never leave."
Joe Skrebels's score of 8.8/10 on IGN said that "gleefully strange, unceasingly grim, and quietly smart, Little Nightmares is a very welcome fresh take on horror."
"An okay platformer but a deeply imaginative horror game, Little Nightmares is worth playing for its array of disturbing imagery," was Samuel's Roberts's conclusion on PC Gamer with a score of 78/100.
Whitney Reynolds gave Little Nightmares an 8.5/10 score on Polygon with the consensus: "Little Nightmares worked its way into my dreams because it's just bright enough, just safe enough to make me let my guard down. The game isn’t always successful at balancing some game design fundamentals. But when the lights went out, it left me remembering that, really, I'm just a small thing in a dangerous world myself. Also, that monsters with big long grabby arms are really, really creepy."
Alice Bell's 9/10 score on VideoGamer.com stated that "Little Nightmares is frightening, in a way that gets under your skin. A way that whispers in your ear that you won't sleep well tonight. Little Nightmares takes things you were afraid of when you were a kid, and reminds you you're still afraid now."
Eurogamer ranked the game 28th on their list of the "Top 50 Games of 2017", and GamesRadar+ ranked it 20th on their list of the 25 Best Games of 2017, while Polygon ranked it 27th on their list of the 50 best games of 2017. It was nominated for "Best Platformer" and "Best Art Direction" in IGN's Best of 2017 Awards.