![]() It’s worth pointing out that few other studios have the confidence to take this approach to horror: not to jolt you with sudden frights or to ration your ammunition, but to probe and puncture your emotional ease by putting foulness in such close proximity to the childish. Another sequence has the pair in a hospital, with mannequins clattering out of the shadows and a bloated man crawling on the ceiling. It’s presided over by a monstrous teacher who raps on the desks with a ruler if she suspects intruders, her neck elongates, with a rubbery creak, and she cranes up into the rafters or deep into the vents after you. Mono soon teams up with Six, and they creep through a school. It’s not as unsettling on the stomach, but it disturbs nonetheless. ![]() Now we have a blue and drizzled city, whose buildings droop like ailing flowers. My abiding memory is of the kitchens, stocked with body-shaped bundles of paper and cloth, where two mutant chefs hacked away with their cleavers. The setting last time around was the Maw-a cross between a cruise ship, a submarine, and an abattoir. Twice now Tarsier has made a game that you can practically smell. Most games committed to scaring us fumble around for a mood of sufficient thickness and either pile on the gore, in the hope that nausea counts as an emotional response, or wind up with an atmosphere of watery melancholy, and call it psychological horror. The art director, Gustaf Heinerwall, seems to relish the inversion of indoors and outdoors later on, beds are suspended between buildings and soaked with rain, and faceless people gather in front of glowing screens in an alley-a contorted parody: as if the ghost of a living room had leaked out into the street. It’s the first, and most subtle, of the game’s images, which hum with headache-inducing power. He wakes in a greyish wood, littered with broken televisions babbling static into the air. Now, in Little Nightmares II-which could be a sequel or a prequel let us say that it keeps having the same theme-we play as Mono, a boy with a paper bag over his head. She hungered for escape and, later on, for something darker. In Little Nightmares, we played as Six, a tiny girl wrapped in a yellow raincoat, who was trapped onboard a ship at sea. ![]() But why on earth should these kids-nimble, skittering, delicate as dolls-trouble the sleep of those that hunt them? Then again, the phrase has always festered with a hint of undeserved scorn, as if it were being spat at innocent children by wicked grownups, the sort of grownups that menaced the pages of Roald Dahl: evil teachers, nasty aunts, grand high witches. What are these little nightmares? Who is dreaming them up? Given that the developer, Tarsier Studios, previously worked on the LittleBigPlanet series, maybe the vile sights that abound here are unfolding in the fuzzy mind of a sleeping Sackboy. ![]()
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