Console Corner: Review of Little Nightmares II

There is a sub-niche of puzzle games that I call side-scrolling death dealers. Limbo, Inside, The Swapper, Never Alone, Black the Fall, and others feature a spritely main character who marches sideways across the screen, encountering seemingly impassable situations, and dies repeatedly until the player makes the situations passable. Little Nightmares is one such game. A success, developers decided to dip their toes in the water again, and in 2021 came up with Little Nightmares II.

Little Nightmares II is in almost every way more of the same. Developers changed the motif from quasi-Oriental to small town America, but the game's mechanisms, design, and gameplay loop are the same. For those who wanted more, II delivers precisely that. In fact, you can could read my review for the original Little Nightmares and be well informed about II. Art, mood, and length remain strengths.

One of the issues of the original game likewise persists, and for whatever reason bothered me more this time around. The slow, finnicky controls. They can be maddening, resulting in situations where some of the game's puzzles revolve less around logic and more around the precision with which the player pushes buttons. For a game whose controls are not optimally designed, this seems a curious direction. So maddening in fact, at one point I almost deleted the game from my PS while trying to solve a “puzzle”. The puzzle involved climbing a set of cupboard and shelves, jumping to grab a rope, swinging the rope back and forth, jumping to grab a ledge, traversing some more ledges, and jumping to grab a hook, a hook which gently brings you back to ground level where you started. At this time you figure out that there was an item on the upper ledges you needed to open a door, meaning you need to repeat the whole procedure. Repeating the movement once would be ok. The problem is that the controls are so poor the player ends up repeating this loop innumerable times. Specifically, failing to jump from the rope to the ledge results in death. Respawn, repeat. Respawn, repeat. Had the game's controls been better designed, e.g. good rope swing physics, everything would have been smooth and players would solve the puzzle without wasting time. I wasted fifteen minutes of time trying to get the 0.1 millisecond rope jump correct, all the while knowing how to solve the puzzle. And there are several such “puzzles” in the game.

In the end, Little Nightmares II is more of the same as Little Nightmares. Artistically, the game is one of the best side scrolling death dealers on the market. Style contributes to the mood, giving the horror devices horror. Controls-wise, however, the game is lackluster, sometimes getting in its own way and preventing players from smoothly completing puzzles. Limbo and Inside remain the cleanest games of this genre on the market.