And the ability to regain a sense of composure, to master each room, each puzzle, hooked me. In turn, the game makes us, the player, feel helpless. But I didn’t see a monster so much as a symbol, a never-ending sense of dread toward any authority figure whom we perceive as having more control than us. When a teacher stands in place as her neck careens up and down Victorian bookshelves, they look less like humans and more creations made of clay. Images of innocence - children - snap and shatter as if they are Precious Moments dolls gone rotten, whereas our elders have snake-like necks and moldable faces that reminded me of the exaggeration of Garbage Pail Kids cards. “Little Nightmares 2" turns a place of safety into one of pure antagonism, from both its environment and inhabitants.
Yet it’s hard not to to think of such unsettling realities as we crouch in corners, hide in boxes and rush to avoid tight spaces with other children, who want to shout, throw food and fart, but also want to tie us up by our feet and string us from the bathroom ceiling. The schoolyard horrors of “Little Nightmares 2" don’t allude to present-day realities such as our current pandemic or the now ever-present fear of gun violence. This is where “Little Nightmares 2" fully takes flight fragile, bullying children aren’t what they seem and teachers have a way of seeing around corners. We start with simple locations familiar to all horror fans - a forest, a creepy cabin - but soon enter a school, a place of early consternation for many of us. What Sweden’s Tarsier Studios has developed feels like the video game equivalent of something that could have been bound in a volume of “Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” It’s not fun when a loose hand turns into a face-sucking creature, but the game is also about showing us that the places we fear and the grown-ups we mistrust aren’t all that frightening if we use our minds to the best of their puzzle-solving ability. Sure, these were used, filthy and broken hospital beds we were traversing, but in these playful moments “Little Nightmares 2" approached the macabre with the kind of surprise present in Tim Burton’s early work.
I set down the controller to just admire the sense of wonder the art conveyed. In one scene, Six and Mono hop and climb among beds that seem to be floating in air. In a game where some commands can be approached with skepticism - when we don’t want to know what’s in the shadows, it sounds like a dare when we’re told to press a button to turn on a flashlight - I often felt a sense of hope through Six. But in our COVID-19 year, the games that resonated asked us to rethink how we view the end of of lives.
To appreciate modern life, I can’t stop playing games about deathĮxtra lives. It’s not a fear of evil, per se, but apprehension about the unknown and what lies ahead. “Little Nightmares 2,” like the original, feels rooted in fairy tales rather than gore, violence, grotesqueness or pure jump scares and stealth, tapping into the mix of fear, apprehension and curiousness we feel as children and carry with us into adulthood.
Of course, the game’s appeal stretches beyond that demographic slice (the first game in the series has sold more than 2 million copies). “Little Nightmares 2" is a horror game for people who don’t necessarily think they like horror games. And then there were moments I turned on all the lights in my apartment, as if surrounding myself in brightness would make it easier to play.īut I mainly want to talk about what I thought were moments of pure beauty and thoughtfulness. I even had to set the controller down once or twice when my nervous hands made it impossible to properly maneuver the slow-moving child protagonist at the heart of the game.
I jumped more than a few times while playing “Little Nightmares 2,” frightened by a sudden movement or the scurrying of something in the dark.