Review: ‘Little Nightmares II’ Mines Terror from the Fears of Children

Few games have so effectively captured the disempowerment of being small as the original Little Nightmares across its singular setting: the Maw, an enormous vessel where kidnapped children are feasted upon by disgusting corpulent beasts that feel sprung from the imagination of Edward Gorey, by way of claymation anti-surrealist Jan Svankmajer. The Maw imposes on players an unmooring sense of the unknown that, coupled with the wordless narrative full of intricate, ambiguous details and the experience of playing as a diminutive, raincoat-wearing little girl, makes traversing the vessel uniquely thrilling.

At its start, Little Nightmares II promisingly exudes the fairy-tale aura of the original as the player takes control of Mono, a barefooted boy with a paper bag over his head who’s trapped in a forest where an enormous hunter captures and disfigures his prey. After a terrifying escape from the hunter’s house alongside Six, who returns here as your AI companion, the children find themselves lost in a derelict water-logged town called the Pale City, where all the adults have seemingly disappeared and the only remaining residents are hideous monsters.

As with the bestiary from the original game, Little Nightmare II’s enemies, monstrously exaggerated versions of adult authority figures, channel recognizable childhood fears. The School, the game’s first area, is home to a deformed grinning Teacher with a horrifying extending neck that reaches around corners to find troublemakers. Her captured students seemingly become the vicious Bullies who patrol the school, their porcelain craniums caved in, suggesting the kind of vicious actions they’ll take if they apprehend Mono or Six.

At its best, Little Nightmares II sustains an effectively ominous atmosphere for long stretches. In a sequence where the camera zooms in close on Mono, slowly creeping underneath the legs of twisted mannequin things that can spring to life and attack him, the sense of menace is palpable. This is a graphically stunning game, not only for its disturbing menagerie of Brobdingnagian terrors and creepy derelict wastelands, but also for the way that developer Tarsier Studios treats the vulnerability of being a small, defenseless child as the campaign’s emotional engine. In a particularly unnerving sequence, Mono withdraws into himself as he creeps past a looming menace, and you may find yourself shaking in lockstep with him.

Despite its memorable antagonists and their threatening behaviors, both Little Nightmares games aren’t particularly violent. More so than Playdead’s Limbo and Inside, which often find their child protagonists dying in drawn-out, gratuitously cruel fashion, Tarsier Studios’s titles are fixated on deriving tension from the suggestion of violence, cutting away from Mono and Six whenever they’re caught by a predator, leaving their demise to our imaginations.

Of course, this game’s too-loose controls could also use some of the tightness and precision of Playdead’s titles, especially during combat sequences where Mono must time the swings of a melee weapon to an audio cue in order to attack enemies before they can maim him. The controls also frustrate during certain sections that demand careful trial and error to get the boy to sneak past or escape from a particular fiend. Unlike its predecessor, this game makes less room for error, and after you’ve had to restart a section more than a few times, you may find that the game has undercut its aura of fear, as well as its sense of fun.

Little Nightmares II finds creative ways of making its locations feel fresh, namely through its foregrounding of a child’s point of view and the eerie ambience of its unique imagery, such as a hollowed-out ward where patients’ beds are suspended over a pitch-black void and a crematorium that resembles the witch’s house from Hansel and Gretel and is ultimately used for the same purpose. And that creativity goes a long way toward quelling the impression that no setting here—from the school to the hospital to an apartment block—is as memorable as the Maw from original Little Nightmares, and that the gameplay is treading a well-worn path.

One of the most unnerving sequences in the original game finds Six being pursued by bloated cannibals foisting themselves all over each other to get to her—an intense chase that makes a show of the girl’s size as she flees from her attackers’ gruesome buffet. A version of this chase happens at least five times in Little Nightmares II. And while Six is a handy and memorable AI companion, capable of being utilized as a guide or for support, it’s unfortunate to see her so often forced into a position of helplessness here given how perfectly capable she is at other times. A frustrating inconsistency, for sure, but it’s one that only barely compromises the experience of playing a game that, as it reaches its provocative conclusion with an abundance of savage shocks and twists, reminds us that some fairy tales don’t have happy endings.