Little Nightmares
Most of the time, movies, like games, can reflect the expression and thoughts of the producer or team about the story.’ Little Nightmares’ (Switzerland, Tarsier Studios, 2017) is a very special expression in a game that narrates the story of a little girl, Six, in a boat (The Maw). What makes this game special is that it is very clever in that there is not a single text in the narrative. This means that all the storylines are open to the player’s imagination, and this form of expression opens up all sorts of possibilities for Little Nightmares’ story. There are many thought-provoking things you can see in this game, and by the end of the game you realize that the nightmare is not as simple as you thought at the beginning, which is what makes this game so reflective.
Horror games are no longer a difficult thing to do nowadays to make players let out a gasp, because those who have made them have learned enough lessons from the many successful horror games that have been made. The hardest thing to control is the level and manner of horror, fitting the theme and concept of the game in the details of the game. Horror at its best is not about bombastic scenes and explosions, but subtle elements that can create and elevate the tension. Joshua Bycer (2022, pp.20) ‘Little Nightmares’ gets the horror and spooky atmosphere just right. Jump scare is a very common and untechnical way of scaring people in horror games, in Little Nightmares this is rarely the case. It’s more about immersing the player in the world they’re building through the art and music to give them a more depressing and scarier atmosphere.
Being a zero-text game, Little Nightmares puts more of the story it wants to convey in the details of the scenes and the characters’ actions than many games do through a lot of dialogue and text clues, as if it were a pantomime performed in front of the player, all in front of them. The overall graphics of the game are cold and dark scenes, even tending towards complete darkness in some cases. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown (H. P. Lovecraft, 1927, Introduction, p.1). Strange eyes can be seen everywhere in these scenes as if they are watching all corners of The Maw. It’s hard not to get a creepy feeling when the player is in such a scene, and at the same time induce a fear of the unknown in their mind. Such scenes are also mostly perspective and blurred vistas. For example, when Six climbed out of The Maw for the first time, there were many Guests’ shadowy figures in the distance. The only light source that the player can control in the game comes from the lighter in their hands. Compared to the DV view in Outlast, which requires in-game battery collection to provide power, Little Nightmares is merciful enough that the player can turn on the lights whenever and wherever they want, giving them some sense of security. After all, too much terror in a game where monstrous monsters can be seen everywhere is likely to backfire on this game.
The music gives Little Nightmares a nice backing effect, and there aren’t a lot of sound effects set up throughout the game for the purpose of scaring the player, more of an empty silence of ambient sounds and the occasional distant screams of monsters. There is a sense of tension and breathlessness that accompanies some of the depressing sounds. The music is a little creepy but not overly frightening, and reflects the importance of music in a horror game. In Demarque and Lima (2013) experiment, players were asked to compare the music in the presence of auditory hallucinations than in the absence of them. The final results were that players reacted more strongly to Fear Emotion, Fear Behavior and Immersion than to the absence of auditory hallucinations.
Little Nightmares is a 2D perspective 3D game and because of this the game also has a greater spatial depth, while giving the player a better visual experience and room to control the character. But while the depth and room to control are enhanced, the difficulty of the game and the overall atmosphere of horror are increased. The environment throughout the game is dark and scary, while the pace when facing the bosses is very tense, in this case increasing the player’s tension on top of the 2D perspective. On top of this, the game this several a very human pace of gameplay. When you look at the progress of the game, you will see that after defeating the first boss the game is nearly one-half of the way through, because at the beginning of the game the producers have designed a number of small levels to familiarize themselves the player with this different action. By the second boss, there is not much to unravel and as you become familiar with the action, the pace of the game picks up until the third boss, where the pace even becomes tense.
In the official website, Tarsier Studios (2017), we can see the introduction of the characters in the game, from which it is not difficult to understand their behavior in the game. The biggest subject, the ship called The Maw, forms an absurd and bizarre world in which the various characters on board form a closed loop that is difficult to escape from once inside. Every once in a while, The Maw attracts a large number of Guests to the ship to eat, and that food causes The Guests to lose their minds, their spirits are sucked by The Lady and their bodies are made into food by Twin Chefs for the next wave of Guests. Some of the children caught on the ship like Six are packed by Janitor and given to Chefs and made into food, the rest are used as labourers on the ship.
Scenes like this remind me of the story of Spirited Away. Six, the main character, arrives in a strange world surrounded by strange looking people. Her parents have been turned into pigs out of greed, just like Guests. Even the villains in these two works have something in common: The Lady, for some reason afraid to look at her own face, breaks all the mirrors, but leaves a small mirror intact; Yubaba is very hard on her own staff, but will give her son the utmost tenderness, and at the end of the film chooses to let Chihiro go because of him too. The difference is that Chihiro ends up escaping with his parents, while Six falls into the abyss after defeating The Lady. At the beginning of the game, Six will somehow feel hungry during the journey and she must eat, but by the end the ordinary food is no longer enough for her. He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself, and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee. (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1886, Aphorism 146) By the time she chooses between sausages and Nome she has fallen completely into the abyss, until she finally eats the souls of The Lady and Guests. At this point Six also confirms the origin of her name, Gluttony, the sixth of the Seven Deadly Sins. But the reasons for Six’s personality need to be traced back to her past experiences. Throughout the Little Nightmares series, players can see that Six has experienced many betrayals and abandonments, although many of them are not what they seem. So at the end of Little Nightmares 2, Six lets go of her grip on Mono.
The Maw itself is the epitome of a nightmare childhood, where strange adults prey on children’s values and even their souls, while also reflecting the child’s view of the absurd adult world. The adults do many strange things that the pre-adolescent children cannot understand, but when the children do grow up, they also become those ‘annoying’ adults. What no one notices is that the adults they don’t understand were once children too.
References:
Joshua Bycer (2022) Game Design Deep Dive. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press,
H. P. Lovecraft (1927) Supernatural Horror in Literature. Available at: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx (Accessed: 15 May 2022).
Demarque, T.C. and Lima, E.S., 2013. Auditory hallucination: Audiological perspective for horror games. SBC–Proceedings of SBGames 2013.
Tarsier Studios (2017) Little Nightmares. Available at: https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/little-nightmares/little-nightmares (Accessed: 13 May 2022)
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1886) Beyond Good and Evil. Available at: https://gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm (Accessed: 15 May 2022)