Throughout the course of Little Nightmares, you’ll learn next to nothing about Six’s background, but you will share her terror as she navigates a whimsical, twisted netherworld filled with viscous childhood monster archetypes. Little Nightmares is a third-person puzzle stealth horror game from Tarsier Studies where you take on the role of Six, a barefoot girl who traipses about in a raincoat (unavoidably reminiscent of Georgie from Stephen King’s IT) as she tries to escape The Maw, a massive underwater vessel filled with oversized evils who will seek to consume Six anytime they are alerted to her presence. Unlike most titles, Little Nightmares stayed with me long after I put it down, and the part of me that learned to love video games as a medium for experience wanders back there from time to time even months removed from my playthrough. What is present is of such exquisite quality that anyone who can enter without expectations has the potential to find something deeply memorable and affecting. What remains is something pure, a pristine reminder of why people love video games, why the format offers something that can’t be replicated in other media, and like horror itself, why they should be taken seriously by the broader critical community. Little Nightmares is a game with a lot of blank space, where many of the expected systems, attributes, and mechanics of a title are simply absent. Many of these instances seek things that would undermine another critical part of the gameplay experience, but few reviewers consider this. Of course a game should have X or Y feature it has been standard in the genre for years is the order of the day. In the worst cases these judgments are doled out from a point of ignorance, where the reviewer wants a title to be something that the developer never intended, but more often these poor reviews come from a misguided presumption of understanding. In the realm of video game reviews, titles are frequently criticized and characterized by what they lack rather than what they present. ![]() Few games capitalize on my core review principle ‘judge what is there’ like Little Nightmares.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |