Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was played in October.

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full of razor blades.

Little Nightmares marks the turning point in my Schlocktober marathon where I started playing games with actual horror elements instead of just horror aesthetics. Little Nightmares is a 3D platformer whose most obvious inspirations are Limbo and Inside; from which it draws much of its structure and many of its aesthetic choices. Like those games your character is a small child, named Six, in a surreal and hostile world. In this case it’s a massive ocean liner known as The Maw where there’s some very hinky stuff going on. Like Inside the game deals more in concepts and images than any kind of concrete narrative, putting you in situations where your tiny character has to traverse environments where everything is massive in comparison to her. The game is scaled as if you were the size of a kitten as compared to a human, and you are constantly trying to figure out how to do things like grab a door handle that’s several times your height off the ground, or move objects that weigh more than you do. Your small size also allows you to fit into tiny cracks and holes, which comes in handy both for getting through the Maw and hiding from its various deadly residents.

The horror of Little Nightmares relate primarily to the concept of consumption. Many of the areas you pass through include humanoid corpses packaged like carcasses from a slaughterhouse, or just various slabs of meat or pools of blood. Six is not the only humanoid creature of her size aboard the ship, but the others are either caged, possibly to be eaten later, or hunted, like the tiny Nomes in conical hats who flee like mice at your approach but can be hugged and converted into friends. Most of the living threats in the game seek to grab Six and cage her, throw her into a pot of soup, or just straight out eat her. There are even tiny sludge-like slugs that will constrict around her, presumably so they can suck her blood. The entire game makes you feel like you’re a prey creature in a den of predators or a fly caught in a spider’s web and it successfully creates a sense of dread as you advance to see whatever horror the game has to throw at you next.

The game also excels at throwing horrific imagery at you, mostly in the background to your exploits. Unlike in Limbo or Inside Six’s deaths don’t tend to be gruesome, but the world she travels through is filled with grotesque imagery. Whether it’s the filthy kitchen where obese fishman chefs shamble around touching all the food with their slimy hands or the later dining room area with its orgy of glassy eyed mastication, the art style is very effective at evoking disgust and revulsion. The game has a few minor jump scares and can be a little frightening at times, but its horror deals more with repulsion than fear. It’s not one of those games where you’re afraid to progress because of what might happens, but rather one where you feel apprehensive about the imagery you might see next.

Despite the game featuring no speech of any kind it does a good job at characterization, with characters’ appearances and movements communicating a lot about them. The way the little Nomes skitter nervously and run in circles, the shuffling gait of the janitor’s tiny legs, or the way Six grabs her stomach when she gets hungry several times during the game all tell the player quite a bit about who these people are. Everyone is caught up in the machinery and structure of the massive ship, and has some place in the ship’s messed up world and society.

The game does have music in a lot of places, often using it to raise tension when your character is in danger, but the real stand out element of the sound is the effects. Because the game has stealth elements and your character sometimes has to sneak past huge enemies who will attack her if they hear her, the loud scraping of metal on metal when you have to pull an oversized item into place, or the thud when your character lands from a high fall (sometimes a sickening crunch when it’s too far and it kills you) is really affecting. When a game can give you a jolt of adrenaline just from the sound of some off screen menace running towards you then it has succeeded in building a strong atmosphere.

I liked the style and atmosphere of Little Nightmares, but I only intermittently enjoyed playing it. Most of this came down to the clunky controls and fixed camera angle. The camera makes sense because it allows the developers to frame their world precisely how they see fit and use angles to build tension and even create challenges by obscuring certain things at certain points. The clunky controls are theoretically acceptable for the same reason that the original Resident Evil’s clunky controls worked; this is a horror game and clunky controls are disempowering. Six can walk, run, jump, crouch/sneak, climb, use a lighter to set certain things on fire (primarily candles), grab ledges, grab and move certain larger objects, and carry and throw smaller objects. She is fairly slow and has some momentum, but the climbing and grabbing controls are maddeningly inconsistent and sometimes the same command will produce a different outcome on similar objects.

However, making a 3D platformer with stiff controls and a fixed camera can create very frustrating scenarios where you know what you’re supposed to do but it’s very hard to line up the jump properly or get the item into the precisely correct position. This is made worse by the fact that sometimes your character can perform unique actions in a single place, like shelving a giant book in a book case and the game gives you no prompts or tips to let you know you can do that. This is primarily a puzzle platformer so some level of thinking things through is expected, but it crosses the line from engaging to frustrating and annoying when you don’t know what you can do, and aren’t even clear if the thing you’re trying to do is even possible given the controls. This is made worse by the fact that the game ‘cheats’ certain actions by, for example, giving you the ability to grab on to certain swinging objects even if you couldn’t actually have jumped far enough to reach it, or allowing you to move some things that are clearly bigger and heavier than other objects you couldn’t push around. It’s just inconsistent on a number of levels. Fortunately the game generally restricts you to only a few areas at a time so you can run around trying everything, but it gets tedious quickly and I took some relatively long breaks between play sessions because of frustration.

When I was running through the world seeing the weird and messed up sights and searching the levels for the way to progress it was really fun and engaging. When I was struggling with the difficult controls and trying to execute a series of actions where I knew what to do but failing repeatedly because it was so hard to line things up properly it was annoying. When I was stumped at what to do because the game was being coy about what actions were actually possible or presenting a bunch of red herrings about what to do next (such as doors with handles that are just out of reach when actually you are supposed to climb a book case and go a different way) I was very annoyed and figuring out what to actually do often felt arbitrary and like my time had been wasted rather than making me feel clever.

If you’re going to make a game that obscures its objectives you have to at least make sure that the controls are consistent enough that if someone tries something it will either work or not work as it’s supposed to. Far too many times in Little Nightmares I would try to climb a surface but it wouldn’t work only to find out that on the third attempt (after wasting a lot of time elsewhere) it did work but I just hadn’t lined things up exactly as the game wanted. Or I would not even try a jump because it wasn’t possible given the distance, only to find that when I did try it my character would magnetize on to the object I was trying to grab and change paths mid-air. I looked up solutions to go forward a couple times after utterly exhausting all attempts and each time it was either something that the game never made it clear you actually could do, or it was something I’d tried but it just hadn’t worked for unknown reasons.

Little Nightmares has a wonderful aesthetic and some truly creative level design but it just isn’t fun to play. It shows how important polish and cohesive design are for a puzzle platformer in the Limbo/Inside mold. Do I think that the cool worldbuilding and great art make up for the frustrating and unpolished parts? Maybe. It’s honestly hard to say. There were times where I was really vibing with the game and having a great time, but other times where I despised it and just wanted to move on. I’d say it’s a game where you might as well just watch a Let’s Play, but I’m not sure that’s true either. Getting to explore these environments can be captivating, and the tension is much higher in a game like this when you’re in control and have to push forward and timidly explore to see what the next threat is. But I’m not even sure that I’d call the game enjoyable on the whole. It had a ton of potential, and sometimes it reaches it, but it has a lot of problems too.

A Note on the DLC:

The main game of Little Nightmares consists of 5 chapters of varying length. The DLC season pass adds 3 more, and surprisingly they are just as long, and sometimes longer, than the main game, which is very unusual. The DLC chapters each draw on the aesthetics of the main game without adding much, so they play against the game’s strengths but not adding much new visually, but they each have some unique aspects and they are much more focused on specific gameplay aspects. The first DLC chapter is more action focused, with you running from a specific threat throughout the chapter and having to figure out how to safely get through a number of environments. The second chapter is focused on one giant puzzle, which is an interesting change of pace. The third chapter is also puzzle focused but does add a bit to the story and world building, and features the only thing reminiscent of combat in the entire game. In these chapters you play as a different character from Six, though you cross paths with her a couple times, but he controls the same way she does so it’s not a significant change. The only difference is that the boy has a flashlight while Six had a lighter, so he has better ability to illuminate things while she could light candles.

Because of the focus on gameplay I didn’t enjoy these chapters as much as the main game. The first DLC chapter also has significant technical issues on Xbox Series X. It often won’t load after death, forcing you to quit the game and restart to continue (though it does save your progress at some, though not all, checkpoints) and that was extremely frustrating and time consuming. It also doesn’t always load the textures properly, and there were times when it was much darker than it should have been (which I know because sometimes the right textures and lighting would load, or would pop in after several minutes.) The other two DLCs worked properly, and didn’t have the issue of failing to load after saves, but the third DLC is extremely dark as designed and I found that very annoying too. There are times when you have to use your flashlight to see where you’re supposed to go and then carry something to that location in the dark, unable to see. In a game where the control is stiff and bad this was kind of infuriating because I didn’t know where my character was exactly thanks to the bad controls. Overall I liked the DLC less than the main game, even if it’s a pretty good value proposition by DLC standards.

Schlocktober Rating: Disappointing Schlock

Little Nightmares has a lot going for it, but it never coheres into an enjoyable experience. The fact that it sometimes manages to fire on all cylinders just makes the many missteps all the more frustrating. Some people might really like this game because they can look past or even enjoy its frustrations but for me this is one of the best examples of a game that with just a few tweaks and improvements could have been really good or even great, but falls short in too many areas. If this were Halloween candy it would be cheap, waxy, chocolate in beautiful packaging. Maybe the gorgeous wrapper is enough for some people, but it’s not something you will actually enjoy eating.