Little Nightmares was a strange little delight.

A cleverly built puzzle platforming game that was as charming as it was creepy as you navigated the yellow raincoat wearing Six around this terrifying and massive world.

Now we get to visit the nightmares again in Little Nightmares 2 from developers Tarsier Studios, and they have gone, well, even more nightmarish.

I’ll come out and say it, I am a complete and utter wuss.

When my wife says we should watch a scary movie, I say nope. Sure once upon a time I cowered whilst pretending to be a stereotypical man type watching the movie that would give me the willies for months, but now I straight out say nope. When it comes to games, I am even more of a wuss, but there was something about Little Nightmares that had me curious.

The first game had a lot of creepy imagery and an atmosphere that got under your skin, but in an interesting way, not a scary one. The second game did something similar but managed to push it that little bit further.

This game has you running around a world as the young boy Mono.

He quickly encounters Six and the two make their ways through the world. The first Level initially feels like an interesting change as you are in a forest exploring.

This immediately feels less claustrophobic than the world of the first game which was always inside the big boat. This feeling doesn’t last long as you enter a building and… well it goes from unnerving location to unnerving location.

A lot of the tenseness has been dialled up for this game as well.

There is a long level that reminded me of the creepy nurses from Silent Hill that properly got under my skin. I had to turn the sound down and charge through the Level as quickly as possible to get through it. Again, I am a wuss, but it has definitely been dialled up.

The gameplay is pretty much the same as the first game which is generally good but a little bit janky at times. There were timed button prompts that didn’t quite line up to what I was doing and deaths felt unfair, but it was minor.

The key to whether or not you will enjoy this is whether or not you want more of the original Little Nightmares.  For the most part the game doesn’t improve on the first Little Nightmares so much as it carries it on into a new setting.

The post Little Nightmares 2 (PlayStation 4/5) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Creepy, terrifying, haunted, dark and occasionally frustrating. That’s Little Nightmares: Complete Edition in its excellent port recently released on the Nintendo Switch. It’s a faithful, full featured release that allows you to take the entire, horrifying experience with you wherever you go.

Little Nightmares is, at its core, a puzzle platformer with a distinctly horror focus. This isn’t the type of horror that’s full of giblets, blood and laughing maniacs, but instead the terror of the dark, strange arms waving from a dirty pool of water, and the unshakeable sense that everything is definitely not alright. You play as a yellow hooded little girl, Six, who has to navigate her way out of any number of disgusting areas.

Broken down toilets, rotten kitchens and deserted galleys will all throw up a variety of interesting challenges. Long arms reach for you from hidden passageways, and deformed chefs huff as they reach down to grab you and turn you into dinner. To stop them you’ll need to use the environment to your advantage. Six is weak, and can’t attack by herself. While the puzzles are generally good, there are a fair number that require you to die just to see what happens if you do this or that, and it isn’t always obvious what you can and can’t interact with in the world.

The Complete Edition also features the trio of DLC that form an alternative take on the game through the eyes of “the Kid”, another child (this time with a blue shirt) in his attempt to escape. The three DLC packs aren’t really separate bits though, combining to make a cohesive journey whose length rivals Six’s original travels. It’s all very similar, with perhaps more of a focus on movement than puzzles.

Unfortunately I found the Kid’s DLC to be less interesting and less well put together than the main game, with often frustrating puzzles where not being in the exact right spot at the exact right time, and not making pixel perfect jumps lead to instead death and a lengthy loading screen. The same issues also ruin the sometimes long chase sequences. You’ll need a quick wit to outsmart all those issues while maintaining the tension, as there are no real consequences for dying except for having to redo the sequence again. Perhaps it’s my poor skill but the curtain feels like it’s being pulled a little too far back when you have to redo a certain section over and over just because you slightly messed up.

Together, the Complete Edition should last you between six to eight hours, if you’re searching for everything, and depending how often you have to restart any particular area. Graphically, nothing substantial seems to have been lost in the conversion to the Switch, which is probably helped significantly thanks to the abundant use of post-processing effects such as film grain. The Switch port retains the same grim, creepy atmosphere and performance was quite good in my experience.

For those who haven’t treaded carefully acrossed a garbage-filled pool tank, or gnawed on a live rat in your desperate hunger, the tales of both Six and the Kid are an interesting take on a very different type of platformer. While linear and not overly long, the tales are dark and direct, which is tonally different from almost every other Switch game out there. This does mean that much of the horror is lost if you’re playing it portable on the bus or out and about.

But if you have the lights off, curled up in bed or on the couch, it’s a great way to take this game out of the living room and into somewhere where you can be terrified and perhaps, frustrated.

The post Little Nightmares: Complete Edition (Switch) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

What’s more terrifying? Being chased, being found, or knowing that something awful could be around any corner?

Little Nightmares, from Tarsier Studios, is an exercise in answering all these questions.

The game world is a twisted vision of a child navigating an oversized adult landscape. ‘6’, a tiny, yellow raincoat wearing girl, flees through the mechanical innards of a vast ship known as the “Maw”, armed with only a lighter as a defense against the dark.

The disproportionate size of objects encountered adds an atmosphere of surreal helplessness as you run, crawl, climb and solve grisly puzzles, all the while hunted by monstrous caricatures of grownups.

Little Nightmares is most easily compared to Playdead studio’s, now iconic, Limbo and Inside. These games are mechanically similar, as they are all primarily side scrolling platformers, with essentially no dialogue or exposition. The story is told through your actions and subtle, mostly silent, suggestions from your environment.

However Little Nightmares does enough to set itself apart from its inspirations. The biggest difference is a literal sense of depth. While Playdead’s games are entirely left to right, Little Nightmares allows the player to move in three dimensions through each stage.

This makes encounters with enemies particularly tense, as instead of just fleeing for the edge of the screen (though you’ll still be doing that a bunch), you can also crawl under beds, clamber onto shelves and generally squeeze yourself into any available recess to avoid detection.

Interacting with the world of Little Nightmares is often disturbingly tactile, as Six will only interact with objects as long as you hold down the ‘Use’ button, giving the player more of a sense of connection with their action in the game world. This is even true of climbing, if you take your finger from the button for an instant, Six will fall. While this sounds like a minor detail, when combined with with excellent sound and art design, the experience of grinding meat to solve a puzzle, or prying a rat from its trap, become even more viscerally unsettling.

At crucial moments however, Little Nightmares is also strangely sweet. The game knows when to give the player time to breathe between moments of panic, peppering its dark stretches with moments of light, whether as a helping hand from a stranger, or simply a glimpse of the sun, sea, and freedom outside.

As for the games faults, they are minor but still apparent. Whereas Limbo and Inside were elegantly simple, delivering a perfectly polished, but mechanically basic experience, Little Nightmares allows the player to interact with the world in more complex ways. This often makes the gameplay richer, but minor bugs occasionally leads to irritating platforming sequences, in which Six won’t interact with what you need her to, or you miss a jump you certainly should have made. A few rough edges still show in graphical hiccups as well, with enemies occasionally moving through solid objects or interacting clunkily with their surroundings.  The game is also relatively short, which I was fine with, but some players may find frustrating if they are seeking something to sink dozens of hours into.

Overall, I would recommend Little Nightmares to anyone who likes their games scary, sweet sad, and strange. Tarsier Studios have taken a now familiar formula and made something uniquely unsettling, but layered through with a poignancy that will stay with you long after the final credits have rolled.

The post Little Nightmares (PlayStation 4) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Do you remember your childhood fears? LITTLE NIGHTMARES, developed by Tarsier Studios, will allow you to embark on a grim adventure as you help our hero “Six” in her yellow raincoat escape The Maw – a vast, mysterious vessel inhabited by corrupted souls looking for their next meal!

With an interactive storyline and outstanding sound design, LITTLE NIGHTMARES is part dream, part nightmare, where every step feels like a leap, and every shadow a vast darkness!

“We’ve been working with the Little Nightmares project for the last year and, from the moment we came on board, it was very clear to us that the game’s distinctive artistic identity was worth supporting. Its grim and whimsical universe really sets it apart and offers a singular experience mixing frightening and light-hearted moments. We can’t wait to watch people play it at gamescom and see their reactions” said Samuel Gatte – Senior Director of Production & Product Support at Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe.

“It’s taken us about 10 years to come to this moment, to reveal the most exciting game in our company history, a dark, thrilling tale of grotesque misfits! Since publishing the teaser last year we’ve worked day and night to bring the game to life, and now, we are beyond excited to show our first original game at gamescom, LITTLE NIGHTMARES” said Andreas Johnsson – Business Developer & Deputy CEO at Tarsier Studios

LITTLE NIGHTMARES will be available in digital form for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and STEAM for PC and is scheduled to launch in 2017.

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