The Little Nightmares Series Part 1 (2017-2019): Hunger
This contains spoilers and minor theorization from both Little Nightmares, its sequel, and its subsidiary spin-offs and comics. I would recommend reading through for a better understanding of the world of Little Nightmares if you’re less of a visual learner, but I’d also heavily recommend experiencing all of the fantastical, dark universe for yourself as well.
Due to this covering so many games, I’ve also assembled as a Table of Contents for reading convenience.
Little Nightmares - Secrets of the Maw DLC - Titan Comics’ Little Nightmares - Very Little Nightmares
Fear is a much stronger emotion as a child or teen than it is as an adult. A nightmare cuts much deeper through the innocent mind of someone who isn’t old enough to be cynical and hopeless, with the line between reality and one’s own psyche seeming so much more blurred. Childhood traumas, due to how strong these emotions are as children, often stick with you forever, no matter how ridiculous or fantastical they may appear to be.
Little Nightmares
Little Nightmares was developed by Tarsier Studios and published by Bandai Namco in 2017 with the intention to bring out the pure, fantastic, horrifying fears of childhood, and place them in a world where “all the worst things in the world could be left to rot." The lead character is a girl named Six, a frail, tiny girl donned in a yellow raincoat. Simply enough, your goal is to escape the nightmarish corridors of The Maw, a giant underwater restaurant.
Six and The Maw.
The game is a 2.5D platformer with mostly left, right, and vertical movement required without much movement on the Z-axis within the 3D space of the game. This works for the most part, but jumping in the game can be imprecise, and generally the game relies on realistic, and somewhat unreliable gripping and momentum. This can be a little slippery in areas where precise movement was clearly intended, despite the game not being able to always achieve that type of platforming all the time. What little 3D movement there is, if not moving very slowly, can sometimes be hard to navigate since it goes for immersion rather than practicality. So. key items, climbable surfaces, and times when you need to go into the foreground or background aren’t really indicated, leaving it up to trial and error too frequently than desired.
That being said, checkpoints are extremely frequent and there are no lives, so dying isn’t of much consequence. This can be both a positive and a negative depending on how you look at it. In a cute little twist, Six will be curled up in a ball whenever you respawn and awaken with a gasp as if she just woke up from a bad dream.
The game’s story is very straightforward on the surface, with no dialogue and next to no clues about the world other than purely through visuals, which is where the game really shines. Your main character, Six, is tiny and small enough to where human-sized environments seem like titanic labyrinths. Each area of the game (an orphanage-like area, a kitchen, the main restaurant, and a residence) drips with atmosphere. Every inch of each grimy surface tells a story. The game is physically and thematically dark, and its lighting chooses exactly what it wants you to see, with the only non-environmental light source being a tiny lighter that you can turn on and off, but can’t use when you need to use both hands.
The dark is strangling and claustrophobic, yet you feel very exposed in the light. The game heavily uses gaussian blur and slight chromatic aberration, which along with the heavy use of high contrast lighting, creates a wonderfully dream-like, or rather nightmarish, look. The artstyle is cartoonish in a sort of claymation (think Coraline or Monster House) way, where things are fairly detailed and real-looking, but with stylized features and uncanny proportions as well as a sort of hand-made look, which works heavily in the favor of the monster design as well.
The light and dark of Little Nightmares.
The monsters in the game are, for the most part, human-looking, but have those aforementioned jarringly uncanny proportions or strange, nightmarish looks and abilities, such as the first monster, the Janitor, and his ability to stretch out his already gangly arms, making up for his apparent blindness and short stature. The Chefs are already creepy looking on a surface level, but hide an even darker detail if you pay closer attention: on occasion, they’ll scratch their necks, during which their hands will reach under the flaps of skin, which is assumedly a fleshy face mask over their real faces. The guests are barely human, disgusting blobs of fat and flesh, while starving for food they don’t need as they charge you just for one more morsel. Lastly, The Lady appears as a tall, beautiful woman, whose appearance is similar to a geisha’s, but possesses dark, life-sapping powers that kill you instantly, with a strong aversion to mirrors that go along with a face hidden behind a mask. A lot of the brilliance of Little Nightmares’ monster design is its combination of body horror and a theme of false identity; none of the monsters are really what they seem.
The monsters of Little Nightmares.
This goes for much of the environment as well, with its dark hallways which are barely lit by your little lighter. Hiding in these hallways are tidbits of a world outside the maw, with even greater threats just out of sight. Every room seems precisely and intricately designed with purpose, and almost no space ever feels like they just needed to fill a room. You are almost never safe either; if you’re not being chased by a monster, you’re at risk of falling to your death, being electrocuted, or being devoured by leeches and creatures hidden beneath mountains of shoes. The few times when you are technically safe, you usually have to deal with a puzzle that needs to be solved while you run through a danger zone. The puzzles aren’t usually very hard, and sometimes are just a matter of platforming over to a key, but this simple task is made much more terrifying by having to climb away from a bellowing monster ten times your size and many times faster than you.
The game’s greatest achievement of horror is this feeling that you’re always close to making it out of any given situation since it requires a lot of that aforementioned trial and error. Every moment you’re being chased feels like a moment you could be caught should you make the slightest error. Sprinting down a hallway as the janitor trails, his gangly fingers reaching out to grab you, the chefs reaching to grab you as you swing on meathooks just out of reach, and running, jumping, and sliding away in terror as a horde of gelatinous guests chase, lumbering and crawling over each other as one ravenous blob of flesh, and just barely jumping to safety are all some of the most tense experiences I’ve ever had playing a game, followed by a fantastic feeling of relief from the quiet, understated music of the game, before being thrust headfirst back into danger.
Credit to MarkVega.
Six is given a great amount of depth for what amounts to nearly no real characterization beyond being a child, with a theme of hunger and the destruction of the nine-year-old’s innocence, becoming more and more foreboding as the game goes on. She will occasionally get a strong pang of hunger, during which you’ll need to find something to eat. At first it’s bread offered by an imprisoned child, then a set trap of meat, then an entire rat. Lastly, you’ll find these adorable little cone-headed creatures called Nomes around The Maw as a collectible for you to hug, and one of the few friendly things in the game other than the sparingly small number of children. However, as one Nome offers Six a sausage to eat, she instead chooses to eat the Nome as it squirms under her. It’s a shocking moment that immediately gives you a sense of dread from Six, who’s otherwise been passive and has shown no real emotions throughout the journey as your player-controlled character. This is when Six becomes her own character, and not just an avatar for the player to explore the whimsy of The Maw.
In the climax of the game, you fight The Lady with a mirror, and ultimately knock her to the ground. In her final rumbles of hunger, Six crunches into The Lady’s neck flesh, killing her, while satiating her hunger and gaining The Lady’s powers. Six then walks down a long corridor filled with guests. They approach her, but are instantly killed as she walks, and the music swells. As she leaves The Maw, you finally realize you were the little nightmare in the end.
Credit to Generic Gaming. Ending begins at 3:44.
The music of the game, composed by Tobias Lilja and Christian Vasselbring, adds to its whimsical, but dark atmosphere. It gives off this sense of loneliness as it drones and echoes, thumping with low bassy rumbles and booming, echoey drums during chases or boss fights like “A Feeling for Meat,” or “The Lady Circles.” The menu theme, a variant of the game’s main theme, “Lure of the Maw,” is a serene, but off-putting little melody set with what I believe is an accordion and a piano (with saxophone added into the main version), and creepy, twinkly arpeggios, which goes perfectly with the game’s immediate tone and visuals. This is evident as we see Six standing at the bottom of a foggy stairway, a gargantuan chain hanging from above, and the girl’s lighter, as well as a dim yellow light peeking out from behind a nautical looking door, providing the only brightness in an otherwise dim, cloudy, mysterious set piece.
“Six’s Theme Part 1” is an eerie, but almost lullaby-like tune that sounds like it’s being played off the world’s creepiest music box with child-like humming, creepy background ambience, and that creepy nautical sound that might be a harmonica or more accordion, and can be heard whenever Six eats, and is more warped every time it's played. The second part of the theme, the part that plays during the final scene, slowly builds a low brass note that increases in intensity as your heart pounds. Is it out of satisfaction for vengeance on the beasts that caused you so much pain, or are you afraid of what you’ve become?
Little Nightmares is a fun little horror platformer that has a running length as small as its protagonist, running just about 3 to 4 hours long unless you’re going for achievements and collectables. You feel like you’ve truly explored a passionately put together, small scale world that leaves you with so many questions which are somehow more satisfying not having a definitive answer to any of it. There are also a few purchasable masks you can get for Six to wear, although they don’t do much other than change your appearance. DLC for the game was also episodically released, called Secrets of the Maw, that followed a separate child parallel to Six’s story.
Secrets of the Maw DLC
The first part of the DLC, The Depths, introduces us to the Runaway Kid, who lives with other kids in the depths of the Maw, in the first area you pass through as Six, which is monitored by the Janitor. The Kid makes an escape with the help of a girl, falling into an even deeper part of the Maw, which is flooded. The girl disappears, appearing to have been dragged away by giant leeches, and only leaves behind a flashlight that you use to see in the dark. As you make your way through the flooded area, solving puzzles to get across the water, at times electrified, you soon enough come to an area too far across to jump, and find you must swim instead. You soon discover you are not alone.
Within this area lies a monster known as the Granny, a creature we know next to nothing about other than that she was apparently abandoned. She has furniture set up, floating through the water, and even seems to receive food in the form of fish and leftovers from somewhere above her, sent through tubes. As you swim, you must distract her with fish or strategically time your mad dashes through the water, not to be pulled under by the monster as she rapidly catches up to you from beneath the surface. Soon enough you get to a small wooden ledge where you find a TV, and push it into the water to kill the Granny through electrocution, and finally make your way out of the lair, up into the Maw, where you’re immediately caught by the Janitor and placed into a cage right next to Six’s.
The Runaway Kid and The Granny.
During the second part called The Hideaway, the Runaway Kid wakes up in a sack, being sent somewhere as all children in the Maw are, but manages to break free. Falling down, we find ourselves in a new area that’s between the Prison where the Janitor monitors the children and where they’re raised, and the kitchen which is located higher up. This area, The Hideaway, is a large area composed of the Prison and a smaller, hidden area where a furnace lies, where the Maw is powered. Here, the Nomes toss coal into the furnace, and it’s revealed through shadows on the floor that the little friendly creatures were once kids. You use their help (after calming them with a quick hug) to solve puzzles. Eventually, the Runaway Kid gets to the top of an elevator, and stands atop it as it rises. As the camera pans out, it’s revealed that the Lady stands just below him, staring up.
A Nome, and the shadows they cast.
The final chapter is The Residence, which sees you going through the Lady’s living quarters attempting to find a final escape route. This area reveals many environmental details about the Lady that hint towards her potential identity and the nature of the very universe itself, and rows upon rows of statues and paintings of herself, a wall of monsters and people (one and the same, really), dolls and shadow kids wearing masks who attack you. She also has a large model of the top of the Maw, which could play a key role in identifying the Lady, seeing as it looks an awful lot like a broken music box we’ll see much later in the series.
Eventually, you get to a small corridor where you see the Lady for the first time looking at herself in the mirror. She appears ugly and aged, not dissimilar from the Granny, even though her face shape is different as shone from behind. Perhaps the mirrors are cursed to show her inner self, causing her fear and weakness of mirrors as shown in the final boss fight of the main game.
The Lady’s (possible) true face concept art.
The Runaway Kid never gets to find out, though, as the Lady hears him and lets out a bloodcurdling scream, lifting the Kid into the air with her powers and turning him into a Nome. As he wanders, now confused and aimless, unsure of his purpose now that any hope for escape has been dashed, the Runaway Kid makes his way into a little room, where he picks up a lone sausage. The Kid has become the Nome Six will end up eating shortly after, a child devoured to save another from their own hunger, though, the question still remains: is Six the one you should be saving?
The DLC is essentially one huge lore dump that doesn’t give too much more explanation on the world or how to fill in the blanks, but instead opts to give you more to question and more dots to connect. It gives the Janitor some sympathy points showing that he makes the children toys and questions the morality of all these so-called monsters. It shows the Nomes as what they truly are and questions the very role of children in this world. It gives hints that perhaps the Maw is much more than a restaurant, as skins lay across the ground near the furnace. Lastly, it shows the Lady at her most vulnerable, surrounded by the sins of her past, or maybe her future and present as well, while questioning who the woman who created this nightmare truly is, and what she has to do with our tiny protagonist.
It is a bit janky sometimes considering it didn’t release too long after the base game, and in particular the second part can get a bit tedious with how dumb and unresponsive the Nome AI can be, but all around, it’s a relatively cheap, worthwhile addition to the horrors of the Maw, if a bit short overall. Little Nightmares and its DLC already present a fantastic world that we haven’t even seen outside of, and leaves innumerable questions still, some of which we’re beginning to connect the dots on.
Titan Comics' Little Nightamres
Shortly after Little Nightmares was released to success, a comic book series with only two issues (four were planned but were later cancelled) released, published by Titan Comics. The comic is told through small anecdotes of kids, Six included who sit around a fire inside the Maw.
The story shows a small bit of Six’s background, with her running around a city avoiding monstrous people not dissimilar to the guests in appearance (which has since been retconned) before a creature called the Ferryman catches her. There is also the story of a boy whose village was destroyed by the North Wind, a tall monster that shrouds itself in thick dust clouds and wind and competes with other monsters to kidnap kids. The Ferryman saves this boy, and brings him back to the Maw, which he seems to have done with Six as well. The second issue shows the story of a girl who’s terrified of mirrors after her and her friends were nearly all killed by a mirror monster before managing to trap it and destroy the mirror, but not before the girl was bent beyond recovery into a hunchback. The Ferryman took her to the Maw as well.
Whether or not these comics are canon is up for debate since they assumedly take place within the timeframe of Little Nightmares but in a setting and time we never see in the game, as well as some later retconning towards the residents of the city we see and the cancellation of the series. The art for these comics is gorgeous, with sharp angles, thick lines, and dark lighting that perfectly translates the stylized look of the game into 2D. I like how Six in particular is drawn; she always seems to have a look of disdain or uneasiness, untrusting of the other children as she refuses to tell her tales. This further builds her questionable morality purely through expressions.
Six’s permanent grimace and the style of Titan Comics’ Little Nightmares.
It can get a little hard to follow at times though, going with the very surreal world, but it does introduce a lot of very interesting plot elements to the story of Little Nightmares that still make it a worthwhile read.
Very Little Nightmares
Seeing as the first game was a success with a dedicated following upon release, a sequel was practically inevitable. Before a full sequel, though, an app game called Very Little Nightmares was released in 2019, developed by ALIKE Studios in partnership with Bandai Namco. A prequel to the first game, Very Little Nightmares follows a familiar looking girl in a yellow raincoat trapped in a new location called The Nest, a large mansion. Similarly to the first game, there isn’t a whole lot of story, and zero dialogue, with just her will to live and the means to escape.
You run into three new monsters, The Craftsman, The Butler, and The Pretender in your escape through The Nest. The Craftsman is a lanky, decrepit old man with gangly limbs and a surprisingly fast wheelchair who persues you through the first area, an underground warehouse. The Butler, a balding, floating man with the power of telekinesis, has his hands locked in a brace behind his back so that he’s always bowed to his mistress, The Pretender is a tiny, silver-haired girl wearing poorly applied makeup who seems to be in charge of The Nest despite being a child. She remains the only child in the whole world of Little Nightmares in a position of power.
The Girl manages to make her way around The Nest and its perils, as well as the monsters inhabiting it, helped by another girl, wearing white clothing. Finally, you get to the end, where your last obstacle is a similarly tiny girl in a pale green dress, The Pretender, who seems to be lonely, holding tea parties with dolls made by the Craftsman.
The monsters of Very Little Nightmares.
When The Girl interrupts her, the final chase begins. You run from The Pretender, who, if she touches you, immediately makes you disappear. She eventually chases you to the edge of a cliff. You save the girl in white from falling into rocks, and in turn she pushes a boulder onto The Pretender, crushing her. However, The Pretender jumps up and knocks both herself and the girl in the yellow raincoat off the cliff, revealing last minute that she has a long braid very much unlike our former protagonist’s messy bob cut, drowning them both as the raincoat rises to the surface and floats off. After the credits, the girl in white climbs down safely to a raft, revealing that she was actually Six on her way to the mainland.
The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat and The Pretender fall.
Throughout the game’s story, the monsters aren’t as prevalent as they were in Little Nightmares; instead, a lot of focus is placed on puzzles that serve as much of the game’s danger beyond a few chase scenes, such as the aforementioned ending. The first game, obviously being on much more powerful hardware with significantly more options for movement, was much more focused on platforming than puzzles, or used platforming heavily in part with the puzzles. Focus was placed on player input and whether or not you could properly figure out how to navigate an environment so as not to get captured or killed, with full control of movement within a 3D space.
Very Little Nightmares, comparatively, doesn’t have the freedom of a controller, being completely controlled by screen tapping more in the style of games like Monument Valley where you’re given a top-down, isometric view of a single room and your character will move to where you tap on screen or interact with whatever object you tapped on. This clearly presents an issue for any platforming or timed options for puzzles, so most of them instead revolve around spatial awareness in an escape room type manner, which actually presents some relatively challenging brain teasers in the game's short length.
The game also looks quite nice for an app game, with the smaller character models being semi-3D in a sort of chibi style with oversized heads and short, stubby limbs, while the larger monsters are still in line with the twisted beasts of Little Nightmares. Backgrounds are in a sort of hand-painted, classical cartoon style overlaid with a strong stylistic chromatic aberration that makes it look somewhat vintage as well, which again takes the theme of childhood innocence (in this case a nostalgic look) corrupted by the dark world, much in line with the beautiful artstyle of the first game but with its own take with a mobile device’s limitations.
Six in white clothes, The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat, and the style of Very Little Nightmares.
Music, composed by Juan Andres GT, also has much more of a presence in this game than in the first, with less ambient noise, soft, creepy synth and percussion noises, and bassy brass, and more full frontal tunes with melodies. The main instrumental focus is actually piano, strings, and drums, sounding much more dramatic and classically orchestral than the first game, down to even having a choir in the final chase. Since the game has to sacrifice a lot of its visual atmosphere because of limitations, I think the music makes up for a lot of the uncomfortable, and yet wonderfully whimsical atmosphere of the world around you. It can be calming at times, at others wonderfully overdramatic, adding to tension that simply tapping your finger on a screen may not have delivered. While not as effective as the first game’s soundtrack and with overall fewer peaks, I do actually find the Very Little Nightmares soundtrack much more listenable as just plain music, with the main theme, “Dump 1”, and “Ending 1” probably being my favorite tracks.
All around, Very Little Nightmares is a fairly impressive little app game that emulates the feeling of the first game pretty well for an outside indie game studio. It serves as a small puzzle piece in the ever growing tale of Six, as well as an interesting presentation of the world outside of it for the first time in-game. It’s definitely worth playing, though not free, being about $7 on any given app store; it’s still very cheap, and I would argue worth the price for a maybe two-hour long game if you’re invested in the universe or would like a little slice of the bigger picture on the go.
