Entertainment

Games: Fans of oddball platformers will love dark, grotesque Little Nightmares

Little Nightmares is a Grimm cocktail of Dahl, Coraline and Tim Burton's good decade
Little Nightmares is a Grimm cocktail of Dahl, Coraline and Tim Burton's good decade Little Nightmares is a Grimm cocktail of Dahl, Coraline and Tim Burton's good decade

Little Nightmares (Multi)

By: Namco Bandai

SWEDISH Tarsier Studios, who contributed much to Sony’s LittleBigPlanet series, have been let loose with their own take on the puzzle platformer. Conceived as a PS4 exclusive called Hunger, Little Nightmares has gone multiformat with its new moniker, meaning gamers of all creeds can experience a haunting, beautiful labyrinth that gets inside your bones.

Mario meets Silent Hill in a grim adventure that should only be attempted by young 'uns if you can afford the therapy bills. Playing out like Dr Seuss by way of Edward Gorey, a little girl in a yellow mac attempts to escape a surreal underwater resort stuffed silly with all manner of grotesques, lighting the way with her trusty Zippo.

Painted with unfettered imagination, Little Nightmares is a Grimm cocktail of Dahl, Coraline and Tim Burton's good decade, but behind the design lies a fairly simple platformer with age-old find-the-key, avoid-the-spotlight mechanics. There are precious few new ideas in this story, but in true Frank Carson style, it’s the way they tell ‘em.

From icky leeches and bloat-faced gluttons to raven-haired women pilfered from J-horror, it’s up to the player’s dark imagination as to what Little Nightmare means, though a chilling sequence set among stacks of suitcases and shoes seems more historic than abstract.

The hide and sneak gameplay will take even incompetents only six hours to polish off (though there are lashings of collectibles for completists to extend its value), but a more polished six hours you won’t find. A technical barnstormer, its rubbery stop-motion-esque enemies, grim palette and canny use of lighting are bona fide art and enlivened no end by heebie-jeebie sound design, with creaking floorboards and the gentle padding of your diminutive feet backed up by a dynamic, atmospheric soundtrack.

It’s not perfect, though. LittleBigPlanet had many wonderful things, but tight, precise controls wasn’t one of them, and Little Nightmares inherits those rather spongy, floaty physics which, combined with a confusing depth of field, can make for some cheap deaths.

Checkpoints are also irritatingly placed, forcing you to replay frustrating sections over and over.

Little Nightmares is grotesque, comes from a dark place and shouldn't be experienced by younger gamers. It’s also comfortably short. Fans of oddball platformers like Limbo and Inside will love this, even if its five chapters leave you slathering for more.