It’s hard to scare someone twice, especially if you’ve used similar scares before. In the case of Little Nightmares, that’s a cellar-dark world of fleshy adult grotesqueries, who shamble around and hunt a tiny child. It’s bizarre, it’s unsettling, it is unforgettable. But can a sequel pull the same trick again?
Little Nightmares 2 previewDeveloper: Tarsier StudiosPublisher: Bandai NamcoPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases 11th February 2021, on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch. Playable on PS5 and Xbox S/X. An update will apparently follow to enhance it for the newer machines.
I’ve played it for a couple of hours and I was worried to begin with. The Hunter I saw in the first chapter didn’t do much for me. He chased me with a shotgun through his trapped grounds, shooting at me, while I hid behind cover and in the long, dark grass. And it wasn’t pleasant, it was tense, but it didn’t surprise me. Didn’t scare me.
Then, though, in the second chapter, we went to school. And this did scare me. Think of it as an olden days school, an austere place of wood and rules, and physical punishment. A place of terrified, and terrifying, children. And Her.
You won’t see her for a while but you will see her picture on the wall, and you’ll catch a glimpse of her shadow on the wall, as she changes appearance with a gristly, crunching noise.
You’ll see her children, you’ll run away from her children, and you’ll see where she isolates and punishes them, in hidden rooms with chalked tallies on the wall. And so, her presence will build. Everything about this warped area she inhabits reinforces her.