Reviews
[Review] ‘Little Nightmares 2’ is a Disturbing, Mesmerizing Dream of a Sequel
Many of my all-time favorite horror games can’t quite hold a candle to the macabre scenery of Tarsier Studios’ Little Nightmares, the 2017 puzzle-platformer that looks and plays as if the Laika Animation team went rogue and really tried to traumatize its family-movie demographic. While the first lacked much buzz leading up to launch, it was well-received afterward, leaving some sizable shoes for a sequel to fill. And Little Nightmares 2 fills them quite well. While it’s perhaps no better than the original overall, it’s also not really any worse. With a few interesting innovations and a greater sense of storytelling, there’s every reason to believe Tarsier’s sequel will keep you up at night just like the first one did.
In Little Nightmares 2, players take on the role of a new suffering child, Mono, though Six and her now iconic yellow raincoat do return to join you on most of your travels. Where the first game trapped players on the Maw, a brooding ship out at sea, seemingly fated to float adrift forever, the sequel washes players ashore in the Pale City, a setting that feels more expansive and vast, even if levels themselves are on par with the first game’s.
As the name suggests, the engine that keeps Little Nightmares 2 moving runs on the fumes of pervasive thoughts, bad dreams, and downright night terrors all through an innocence-lost childlike lens. Pale City is home to a decrepit schoolhouse full of wooden students who do their rubbernecked librarian’s bidding. The hospital houses a predator who scurries along the walls, picking apart the parts of left-behind prosthetic limbs. Each spot along this new nightmare feels like the unraveling of a child’s mind in those moments where they’re alone in their room and can’t get to bed for the shape of the shadow lining their wall.
The enemies in Little Nightmares 2 feel slightly less inspired than the cooks, gluttons, and others from the original, and this is most apparent in the game’s first setting where players escape a hunter with an admittedly unnerving burlap sack over his face much like an early Jason Voorhees. But there’s much less to be scared about when it comes to his hunting rifle as compared to, say, the otherworldly appendages of the janitor. No matter how loud those shots ring out, a gun just isn’t as scary in a horror story, as illogical as it sounds. Horror stories get this typically, which is why so few slashers and monsters carry firearms. Later enemies, especially the last two whom I won’t spoil, are much stronger though, and feel more akin to the quality of villains in the series debut.
Little Nightmares 2 is a sidescroller, but even calling it 2.5D seems off. There’s once more a lot of space to work with, as players can move far from away from the camera and even manipulate it a bit manually to get a better look at threats ahead or chasing you from behind. As before, this results in a few depth perception issues, as the Z axis can be hard to judge at times, but the developers seem to understand this and tend to work within their limitations. There’s a greater sense of defense in the sequel too. Virtually every puzzle in the first game demanded players run for their lives, but in the sequel, you’ll often lure enemies one way only to smash them to bits with a metal spoon or hammer when they’re distracted.
Be it these weapon-wielding puzzles or more typical platforming, escaping the clutches of the monsters often involves some frustrating trial and error where you have just enough time to move perfectly or else get stuck. Experiment, or simply delay, and you’ll hit the game over screen. As annoying as that can be, each scene is set smartly to subconsciously guide the player through in that first go, and when it comes together and you narrowly evade some hideous threat, Little Nightmares 2 is as thrilling as ever. As with the previous game, it feels boom or bust. Do it right and it’s an unforgettable tour of a macabre museum. Slip up, and you may soon find yourself washing out the thrill before getting through it. At least on new consoles, the load times are virtually nonexistent, which makes dying much more tolerable than it used to be in this series.
When the game does give players a breather, the puzzles are satisfying because the answers often hide in plain sight. Full of “aha!” moments, Little Nightmares 2 would much rather scare you than confuse you, but it successfully mixes in puzzles, secrets, and fun collectibles for the completionists to indulge in during those rare moments when some unfathomable terror isn’t scratching at their heels.
The same somewhat unwieldy controller scheme and heaviness return from the first game. It seems to take a second too long to get into a full-speed sprint and those weapons you wield can hardly be wielded at all, with the weight of them really coming through with every button press. The first time around, I felt the game’s default controls were a flaw, but in the sequel, I grew to appreciate them. Like Silent Hill 2 or the survival horror games of old, a moment is enhanced when you don’t feel like you have totally reliable control over your actions. Nothing is broken, it’s just purposely cumbersome, but four years since I first tried, I find it’s better for it.
As up and down as those gameplay decisions can feel, the story feels more important and fascinating, building on the strange lore of this nightmare world. Before Little Nightmares 2, I’d have believed there is no unifying logic to the story universe, that all things seen and heard are there simply because they unsettle the player the most. But Little Nightmares 2 seems to have something to say beneath its persistent superficial goosebumps, and the third act’s heavy lifting in this regard is intriguing to see unfold.
Seemingly inspired by both Slender Man and It Follows in different ways, Little Nightmares 2 may be revealing a puzzle the player never knew they were solving. It’s certainly a series in which I’d love – and expect – to see another game from in the future. There’s still more to discover, and despite my guttural reaction to its grotesque world, I wanted to see it all.
Darkly enchanting in its disquieting art direction and twisted lullaby of a story, Little Nightmares 2 feels a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not a sequel that moves the series forward all that much, though it’s also fair to say it doesn’t play it safe. It takes some risks, narratively and otherwise, and they work out more often than not.
You’ll struggle to lose sight of its monstrous creatures even after the credits roll, as you find yourself dwelling on what it may all mean. Little Nightmares 2 pulls players into its in-between, peeking through the veil of safety and security toward something innately upsetting, but also mesmerizing. Even when you can’t run away fast enough, it’s just as hard to look away at all.
Little Nightmares 2 review code for Xbox One provided by the publisher.
Little Nightmares 2 is out February 11 on Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Developer Strange Scaffold has an impressive variety of games in their catalog. Last year, they published the excellent monster-hunting Max Payne-like El Paso, Elsewhere, which I consider to be one of my favorite games of 2023, but that doesn’t mean all their games are third person shooters.
They’ve got a sci-fi body horror economy game (Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator), a cutesy story-based poker game (Sunshine Shuffle), and even an adventure game where you talk to stock photos of dogs (An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs). Even knowing the variety of both theme and gameplay they’ve worked in, I don’t think I was prepared for them to announce Life Eater, which they describe as a “horror fantasy kidnapping simulator,” which simultaneously ended up being exactly what it says and nothing like I expected.
The story setup is pretty simple: you’re a modern-day druid who lives in the suburbs, and once a year you must sacrifice a person to your god Zimforth in order to keep the world from ending. After the first chapter of the game, the protagonist kidnaps a man and locks him in a cage in his basement, and the relationship between these two is the crux of the drama. Throughout the years you see their relationship evolve as they discuss heavy themes of questioning your faith and how far you let your devotion take you. It was clear from El Paso, Elsewhere that Strange Scaffold’s creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr. has a good sense for stories and characters, and there’s a great deal of warmth and relatability in the writing of these two. It’s all told through cutscenes featuring stylish still images with full voice acting, making for a very attractive narrative package to go between the levels.
So what exactly is a “horror fantasy kidnapping simulator” and what does that entail gameplay-wise? It’s a lot more abstract than you might expect. Instead of actually controlling an avatar and sneaking around, you use a video editor-like interface to slowly reveal information about your target’s schedule until you have revealed the percentage of their schedule needed to abduct them without getting caught. Each person has a timeline for each day of the week, and initially they’re full of boxes blocked out by static. Click on that box and you’ll get three options for how to reveal it, each costing a different amount of time and adding a different amount of suspicion to your character.
These options range from “slash tire” to “hack computer” to “enter home,” but this is mostly just flavor text, as the important part is the ‘resources’ that it uses. Each level has a specific amount of time you’re given before you need to abduct the targets, so watching your time is extremely vital. The suspicion meter also needs to be managed, but that can be reduced by activities that cost time. Even if you fill your suspicion meter, it’s not game over, as you’re allowed three strikes before you’re caught by authorities. Every action option has a different chance of successfully uncovering the activity on that block, but it never feels clear exactly what the percentages are you’re dealing with. Success reveals the schedule block with activities like sleeping, eating, working, etc., allowing you to eventually get the shape of the person’s day.
While it’s a very clever set up, sometimes the game struggles to balance the abstract nature of the mechanics with the narrative it’s trying to tell through the options and schedules. For a while I was paying attention to whether I was stealing a person’s pet or stalking their social media, but after clicking my way through several schedule blocks, I was mostly just looking at the numbers involved. Even when I was paying attention, the option still felt divorced from the action, as it wouldn’t feel natural for something like slashing someone’s tires to reveal that they were having dinner at that time. That said, there were a lot of tense times where I had to carefully choose my options in order to get by, and that tension felt exciting when it worked.
Aside from the resource game of revealing the schedule, there is a clever puzzle aspect in Life Eater that draws you back into the story of the game. In many of the levels, you’ll be given a vague order from Zimforth about who your target should be, and you’ll have to investigate multiple people in order to figure out which one is the correct target. This forces you to engage with the narrative aspects of revealing their schedule, tying mechanics and story together nicely. There were times when I was genuinely surprised by the results of one of these investigations paying off, but other times I got frustrated trying to figure out exactly what the game was trying to tell me. If you miss the wrong schedule square, it can really hamper the progress of your investigation, dragging things out and forcing you to play the level over again to give it another shot. I feel like there was at least one level where I just picked my victim based on a hunch and ended up being correct, leaving me unsure if I figured out the designer’s intentions for the puzzle, which left me feeling unsatisfied.
After each abduction, you also are tasked with performing the sacrifice ritual to appease Zimforth. The screen for this involves the victim’s internal organs along with some questions about them that need to be answered to guide the ritual. For example, you’ll need to either remove the victim’s pancreas or large intestine based on whether or not they have a commute, or break specific ribs if they have children. These questions never change from level to level, but they are another tactic to get you to be more involved with the actual content of your victim’s schedule. Although there was a fun tension to having to continue to dig for these answers even if you’re already revealed the required amount of their schedule, there were times where the answers felt less clear than they should or where I was failing the ritual for reasons that were not apparent to me.
Outside of the very good looking cinematics, the visual design in Life Eater is serviceable but underwhelming. It’s got a great color palette that ties it to the cutscenes, but the video editor aesthetic, while novel to see as a main interface in a game, doesn’t particularly wow you visually. Everything in the UI is pretty clear and laid out in an intuitive fashion, but for being such a UI driven game, there isn’t really a next level art focus on it.
Strange Scaffold prides themselves on their tight and worker-healthy studio culture, so it’s nice to see a game like this that’s properly scoped. It has its core mechanic down, it finds ways to add wrinkles, and gets out before it feels like it’s gotten too stale. Over the three hour campaign, I liked the story it laid out through both the cutscenes and mechanics, but I still wish there would have been a bit more polish to the final product. While there were some great moments that were revealed in the investigations, those moments of inspiration were less frequent than I would have liked. I appreciate when a game can meld mechanics and story together, and this shows that they can do it, but there’s a few too many points of frustration in the structure that can occasionally get in the way. I definitely see the storytelling potential that this format has, so I’m hoping that the Endless Mode, which is coming after launch, will help refine that process and show what it can really do.
Until then, Life Eater is a clever experiment in using a unique gameplay mechanic to tell a compelling tale that falls short of its full potential.
Life Eater arrives April 16th on PC via Steam. Code provided by publisher.
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