The Haunted Hoard: Little Nightmares (PC)

I attempted to play Little Nightmares for the 2020 iteration of The Haunted Hoard, but my computer at the time struggled with the game even on low settings. I am usually of the opinion that making your game more accessible is better for everyone and taking a graphical hit to allow more players to play the title is often worth it, but after getting a new computer I realized Little Nightmares would be the perfect game to test my increased capabilities and I quickly saw why the game wasn’t interested in compromising its artistic direction. Little Nightmares lives or dies on its meticulously crafted visuals, the actual action not quite up to par with the atmosphere.

 

Little Nightmares is the kind of horror narrative that plops you in with no details and doesn’t even use any dialogue to flesh out its story. Almost everything must be inferred from the areas you explore, although they are not particularly subtle or really deceptive with their implications. The game stars a young girl in a raincoat referred to as Six in outside materials, her early exploration of the world around her at first not having any clear motivation. She’s in a dark wet industrial environment, the screen lilting ever so slightly left and right to give a light feeling of seasickness. Proceeding forward though you begin to get the hints that Six’s efforts are to escape this place, the game’s setting known as The Maw and having a few distinct areas you move through during the escape. A dormitory for children, a kitchen area, a restaurant for enormous ravenous humans, the settings all pile on new environmental details that make certain elements of the story apparent while giving you smaller bits of information to infer details from like how Six might be related to all of the events, but the absence of any really complex characters or a plot greater than a small string of realizations does make things feel more like a setting concept to tour than a story being told.

The tour of The Maw is certainly a striking one, the antagonistic forces of the game rendered in a style that almost looks like stop-motion animation both in the eerie stiffness of their sometimes clay-like flesh and the strange quirks of their animation. The eyeless janitor’s long limbs and bandaged eyes are perhaps his most obvious feature in constructing a memorable creepy character but his odd jaw movements push him further into uncanniness. The skin of the flabby restaurant patrons and the folds of flesh seen on characters like the melancholic looking chef all look artificial even though they lean more towards recognizable humanity, and the chef’s brother in particular has an effective moment where you realize there’s more to his sullen face than first appears. The environments are lit with a rather natural yet moody approach as well, leaning more into the mind struggling to realize these are game graphics and not some physical space for characters made of clay. Sometimes even a simple area without anything to do will have some wonderful staging to emphasize your smallness, to weigh down on you with the oppressive darkness of the setting, or even blind you with unexpected light and an unfortunate sight. The illusion of this carefully crafted work can be briefly broken by certain animations like when Six gets grabbed by a creature who clearly couldn’t reach her naturally or had to suddenly move faster than they would elsewhere to complete the action and at certain points it doesn’t hide that it’s looping a single behavior well, but if Little Nightmares lures you in with its impressive environments, lighting, and character designs, you will definitely find the graphical side of the adventure is lush with what you’re looking for.

 

However, I did append a caveat at the start to the praise of the visuals. Little Nightmares is primarily composed of action, puzzles, and stealth in areas that give you a full range of 3D movement. Unfortunately, most every part of the gameplay side feels rather underfed and simplistic, sometimes to the point it does break the atmosphere with how you need to consider the game world and thus realize the artificiality of what you’re experiencing in a way different than the stop-motion similarities. One of the ways this most comes across is how the game constructs rooms with small puzzles in them. While Little Nightmares will have entire detailed rooms with unique objects to briefly establish a bit of the setting without it being either necessary or asking you to dwell on it, when you then get to a room with a puzzle things can feel oddly spartan. In a room with a lever out of reach there will be a big object on the ground to push over to it, and if you need to distract a character to sneak by there will be a noisy toy in the middle of an empty floor to activate. A lot of the times a challenge in an area is simply realizing you can climb something like a bookcase or pile of plates as if they were ladders or realizing there’s a loose floorboard just by happening to walk over it, so you rarely get the satisfaction of figuring things out either because it tips its hand too much with its clues or it’s just about figuring out you can interact with a piece of the environment in a simple way.

This can extend to moments where you’re sneaking around or even running from one of the monstrous inhabitants of The Maw as well. You’ll enter a room with some big dangerous character unaware of your presence and a table it is completely safe to hide under is right there, the path to avoid detection and keep moving forward often so easy to identify they usually add something you need to bump into in order to make progress make noise so that the pursuer even has a chance of detecting you. If you do get grabbed and killed Little Nightmares actually isn’t too punishing either, starting you nearby so you can fairly easily try again. Some effective designs are drained of their horror when you know that the long arms of the janitor wrapping around you only means you’ll be right back outside the room he is lurking in and whatever allowed him to grab you is something you can easily accommodate as you reenter. The game does attempt to use some straight action segments to add some more controlled and perilous excitement to the affair though, Six sometimes needing to outrun instead of outmaneuver angry pursuers who will kill her the moment they grab her. Usually these are short but just long enough you’d prefer not to repeat them, although since Six is limited by her stamina, these segments where you need to be running to survive can end up draining her before she reaches a jump she can’t make unless you find the spots in the chase where you can switch to a brief immersion-breaking stroll.

 

If you do pick up the Complete Edition though you can play through three DLC chapters that star a new character, The Runaway Kid. Six and this new protagonist play pretty similarly, although Six uses a small lighter to illuminate dark areas and the kid takes a bit to get a flashlight he can aim around, but these chapters do have some more involved puzzle solving, a few segments of action where you can feel more like you’re avoiding something dangerous without needless limitations, and even a few more details on the characters and world to flesh it out more. Working together with some occasionally confused but interesting AI controlled allies, needing to actually build a safe path forward, and a more complex series of interconnected puzzles make the DLC probably the better gameplay experience even if it’s not much without its story relation to the main plot. The main story does have a few extras to pursue as well like befriending the skittering Nomes hidden around The Maw or lighting hidden lanterns, although there are no extra endings or anything so those concepts are mostly to inject a little more incentive for exploring or solving some puzzles with a bit more focus since you’re meant to pick up on their existence rather than being in rooms designed to funnel you towards a solution.

THE VERDICT: Little Nightmares has some marvelous environmental designs, effectively grotesque characters patrolling its world, and a mastery of things like tonal lighting that make even screenshots of it both gorgeous and haunting. Such an effective atmosphere compels you to explore deeper into The Maw, but it seems to thrive on its looks alone. The world does tell a story but the clues either are too isolated to extract much from or leave little to the imagination despite some potential metaphorical implications. Puzzles are often weakened by the fact you simply aren’t given many ways to get the puzzle wrong and the danger of the monstrous beings you must run from is lessened by forgiving checkpoints, obvious ways to avoid them, and some artificial feeling limitations to give them a sporting chance. While the DLC improves on some of those elements, Little Nightmares on the whole needs to be thought of as a lightly interactive virtual horror space or else you risk disappointment when the meticulously constructed setting presents its rudimentary gameplay.

 

And so, I give Little Nightmares for PC…

An OKAY rating. Little Nightmares ends up in the same spot I found Gris to occupy, the game’s visuals so impressive on their own they’re still worth experiencing even if the gameplay doesn’t really make the act of doing so compelling. The liberal approach to checkpoints and the often straightforward puzzle solving perhaps benefits that aspect of the experience as you don’t often linger in an area unless you’re sticking around to appreciate the eerie decor, the difficulty barely able to bar you from heading into a new room that can easily wow you with its attention to detail and careful construction. It would be more interesting if there were deeper implications to be unearthed by exploring these spaces, but there are still at least a few moments or environmental touches that add a bit to the characters and situations so they’re not hollow. It does feel like Little Nightmares answers a few too many of the direct questions with the ones left in the air to ponder on or make educated guesses at feeling like they don’t add enough to the overall mystique. It’s not without its mysteries but they don’t feel substantive enough to ruminate over since the clues often point towards one answer or none at all, so besides avoiding direct acknowledgement since the game lacks text it can feel like you’re not given much narrative meat to dig into. That makes the little failures of aspects like sneaking around or running away a bit harder to swallow, the game perhaps needing to make such situations more malleable so that you can’t always use the same hiding spots or won’t notice the animation loops in figures that seemed fearsome until game mechanics brought them down to earth.

 

Perhaps if it could have run with worse graphics settings I’d have thought less of Little Nightmares, but it’s instead the latest in a growing subset of games where the looks can still make it worth experiencing even if the game aspects are lacking. If you want to hinge your game on its appearance alone there are genres for it or you can even have the actual interaction be entirely straightforward so there is no illusion of involved participation, but actually doing things like grabbing keys, climbing the environment, or “outwitting” enemies in Little Nightmares ends up feeling rather tepid because its design is too simple to enjoy and the actions taken don’t feel challenging. The DLC is probably the more promising path for this game as it managed to better obfuscate puzzle solutions so they required more thought or made trying to avoid danger a more involved affair, the complete package the better recommendation. The main story is less ambitious in how it plays while the DLC can’t manage the same level of impressive sights, but together they make a horror experience that can at least stand on the phenomenal work of the art team. Little Nightmares does have an edge since horror fans tend to heavily emphasize the importance of the visual atmosphere of a game, so I’m sure there are many who will still enjoy this game because they can more easily overlook the bland interactive side of the experience.