Genetic
disposition, environmental response, brain tuning—whatever the
nature vs. nurture argument is, I love games like Limbo and
Inside. A parade of bite-sized puzzles with a coherent art
motif binding them all together, they are true brain candy. Offering
more for the player so inclined, they likewise give tantalizing hints
and clues about the larger world of the game, giving rise to
questions about who, what, where, and, why. When hearing Tarsier
Studio’s Little Nightmares (2017) was in this same vein, my
radar pinged. Having now played the game, it’s still pinging.
Though
having the same relative concept as Limbo and Inside,
Little Nightmares is themed entirely differently. The player
guides a little girl in a yellow raincoat named Six through a ship
full of bizarre traps, puzzles, and human-ish things wanting nothing
more than to catch her. Skittering gnomes, leaky pipes, macabre
effigies of humanity, dark corners, leech-like crawly things,
creaking doors, the roll and pitch of the ship—all combine to give
gameplay a surreal, horrific feel. A little girl trapped in a big
person’s world, survival is not always guaranteed.
Though
occasionally similar, overall Little Nightmare’s puzzles are
different than Limbo or Inside. Where those puzzles
move very linearly, one after another, puzzles in Little
Nightmares fit within a larger script, some scenes and characters
returning after they seemingly disappeared. The puzzles are not more
difficult or complex, only more inherent to setting and changes in
mood—now fast, now slow, now big, now small. Where Inside
or Limbo are compact, efficient games, Little Nightmares
is more spread out, the ship a dark, detailed, network. Six does a
fair amount of walking, climbing, and crawling between puzzles,
giving the player a chance to experience the ship and ask questions
about where she might be (as well as be unprepared for a jump scare).
As
hinted, Little Nightmares is a very artistic game. More than
just good graphics, Tarsier clearly wants the player to experience
the game’s world at the conscious and sub-conscious levels.
Feeling like a Studio Ghibli movie with the horror element turned up
a few notches, entering the kitchen area, for example, is not as
simple as walking through a door. Rather, the player must jump and
grab a meat hook running along a slide rail and be carried into the
kitchen. Hanging there, sliding along, being taken who knows where,
the player has time to ask: is Six just a piece of meat? Given the
Miyazaki feel to the “chefs” they find there, there are
evocations of childhood, but in a spooky, grisly way.
Though
technically a 3D game, Little Nightmares nevertheless feels
like a 2D game given the side-scrolling movement and short field of
depth which is traversable. Open world, it is not, more like Streets
of Rage or other such old school games which moved primarily left
and right and allowed for a little up and down. If there is a second
Little Nightmares (or similar game) made, I would hope
developers extend this portion as the possibilities seem engaging.
There
are a few issues with the game. One would be length, specifically it
felt like it was lacking a major Act. The three bits of DLC fill
spaces in the game’s narrative in very interesting fashion, but
Six’s story, if it can be called as such, still feels incomplete.
An additional setting/hour of gameplay would perhaps smooth things
out. A further issue is that controls are one-degree too tight. I’m
writing specifically about grab points and climbing. Moving Six
around through the stages is always a game of angles, and sometimes
those angles are off just enough to cause the game’s detection
engine to miss the grab point you’re standing directly beside, just
not that one degree close enough. For example, there is one scene
wherein Six is supposed to remove bars from a cage while avoiding
moving obstacles. Standing beside the bars was not enough to grab
them. The player must find the exact, precise spot that allows the
system to detect grabbing is possible to be able to grab. Climbing
is likewise not always a smooth affair. Six doing a fair amount of
air humping, climbing a set of shelves and reaching the top sometimes
requires shuffling a little left or right to the sweet spot where the
game allows you to climb further, despite that the entire width of
the shelf appears climbable. But I digress.
All
in all, Little Nightmares provides just as much puzzly-fun as
Limbo and Inside while fully possessing its own style,
mood, and manner of asking questions without asking them.
Mechanically it could have been a little tighter, particularly the
grab and climb mechanics, but overall the clumsiness is only
occasional, things working as expected the majority of the time. Put
simply, the game’s positives (art, mood, puzzles, etc.) far
outweigh the negatives. Such games so much fun for me, I sometimes
feel like game developers could make this type of game forever and I
would keep playing them forever…
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