The Little Nightmares Series Part 2 (2021): Togetherness
This is Part 2 of the Little Nightmares series, the first part being Part 1: 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 Comics - Little Nightmares II - The Story of Little Nightmares - Conclusion
With the release of Very Little Nightmares came the announcement trailer of the official, full console release of Little Nightmares II in August on 2019 at Gamescom, and hype around it began building as the game’s cult following began theorizing and hypothesizing about what the game could be about, where it stood in the timeline of the series. A demo was released in October of 2020 featuring a chunk of the game’s first area, but the countdown towards the release of the game began with a series of digital comics.
Little Nightmares Comics
The Little Nightmares Comics app launched on January 13, 2021 and updated January 27 and February 10 with two new episodes per update. Made by Plast!ek comics, the digital comic is in no way related to the previous comics, which shows in the artstyle.
It’s very different from the first set of comics; while Titan Comic’s Little Nightmares was much more grim, messy and cartoonishly stylized visually, LN Comics is comparatively much cleaner with a sort of lineless pastel drawing or oil painting sort of look with a lot more detail. Personally I like Titan Comics’ style more as a stylized translation of the first game’s style, but LN Comics is technically much closer to the actual game’s look, and I can’t help but love the addition of keyframed animations and sounds as a digital-only motion comic.
The style of Titan Comics’ Little Nightmares vs. the style of Little Nightmares Comics.
These comics introduce the new monsters of Little Nightmares II (which I’ll describe in more detail in the LNII segment) as well as some new characters before the events of the game.
Episode 1 follows Six, at this point without her raincoat, running through the woods from a monster called The Hunter. Briefly managing to escape, she sees a boy with a paper bag over his head sitting in a tree, distracting her long enough to be caught.
Six and The Hunter.
Episode 2 follows a boy called The Toddler wearing only bandages over his eyes and a diaper, as well as carrying a bag on a stick. Travelling through a forest, he hears a scream, but going to investigate, only finds a television through which a beast known as The Thin Man emerges, and takes him back into the screen.
The Toddler, and his final moments with The Thin Man.
Episode 3 follows a girl with braids and a permanent nosebleed trapped in a hospital room when a benefactor slips spoons under the door. She makes an attempt to escape, digging for ages and continuously breaking spoons, and eventually she gets back up to the surface only to realize she didn’t dig far enough and is still in her room. Suddenly, the door opens, but as soon as The Girl With Braids walks out, the monstrous Doctor crawls above her on the ceiling.
The Girl With Braids, and her escape getting quickly cut off by The Doctor.
Episode 4 follows The Fat Kid, who is exactly what his namesake suggests and wears overalls and a buttoned-up shirt. He carries a lollipop with him as he makes an attempt to escape from a school, chased by monster children called Bullies who have porcelain heads. He smashes several of them with his lollipop before finding a locker to hide in. After he peaks through the holes, though, he’s discovered by The Teacher, looming over him.
The Fat Kid, and his discovery by The Teacher.
Episode 5 follows a first person view of a child as they try to find food in an apartment in the city. Finding an injured rat, they try to save it, escaping past the twisted residents of the city, The Viewers. However, their TV shuts off, no longer distracting them. The rat dies, and the last shot shows the kid in a white sheet, called The Ghost, in their final moments.
The Ghost, and a POV of the viewers as he’s caught.
Finally, Episode 6 follows the same kid from Episode 1 seen in the tree, known as Mono. He wakes up in a burning building with several other children. Sprinklers put out the fire, but an obscured figure begins to pick kids off one by one. Mono runs, hiding in a broken TV, but is soon found by the figure.
Mono in the burning building.
The comics, like the first set, are kind of debatable in their canonicity since some of their details contrast with or don’t give a clear view on how they could be followed up by those presented in Little Nightmares II, notably Mono’s (although some are directly referenced in the main game), but at the very least they give a strong introduction to all of the new monsters and set the tone for the second game, and at the very least Six’s story is directly followed up on in the game’s plot. The app is free so there’s no real reason not to read it, and each individual story is short, well illustrated, and is best enjoyed with headphones in for some genuinely great shocks.
Little Nightmares II
Finally, after years of buildup and an incredible amount of excitement, Little Nightmares II was released on February 11, 2021. Taking place in several locations rather than just the Maw as in the first game, Little Nightmares II is by far the largest piece of media in the series thus far in terms of sheer scale of the world. It follows Mono, the paper bag-headed boy from the comics, as he makes his way through the Pale City to a place known as the Signal Tower, with the help of a familiar raincoat-wearing girl.
Our heroes in the Pale City.
The game begins with Mono dreaming of a door at the end of a long hallway before he awakens with a start, laying next to a TV in the woods. He makes his way through the woods, avoiding traps, before he comes upon a cabin filled with horrifying stuffed corpses sitting at a dining table. Before long, he hears the sounds of a music box, and breaks into the room where the sound is coming from with an axe. There, he finds a little girl playing with the box, who’s startled when Mono Jack Torrance’s his way into the room, and offers a hand. She almost takes it before shoving past him at the last second and sprinting away. He follows her up to the top floor where she’s trying to pull the cord to get up to the attic, but is too short. She spots Mono and is defensive, but he calms her down enough that she cautiously allows him to help her, establishing their tentative friendship.
Mono and Six meet for the first time.
Little Nightmares II plays almost exactly the same as the first game with a few touches of improvement as well as a very slight expansion of versatility for Mono, and how he can interact with Six. Because areas are a lot more expanded and well lit, with a few exceptions, 3D spaces are a lot easier to traverse, and you move into the foreground and background a lot more than in the first game. Because there are a lot more enemies of a comparable size to Mono, you come across quite a few weapons to effectively deal with them rather than just running, usually something along the lines of a hammer or a large soup spoon that Mono can just about drag around.
Melee “combat” can be extremely imprecise and clumsy as it is in most survival horror (-ish, the lack of resource management stops the Little Nightmares series from really being survival horror) games like Silent Hill, which one could argue adds to the feeling of helplessness, but in a game like Little Nightmares II, which is a lot more reliant on its fast-paced, moment to moment gameplay and set pieces, it doesn’t really work very well and got me most of my deaths in the game. That being said, there’s only a couple instances of this combat, so it isn’t really very intrusive fundamentally.
The other main change to the gameplay is how Six is involved. AI controlled, she’ll follow you around, help you figure out where to go, boost you up to higher places, solve puzzles, and warn you of danger, all in a much more reliable way than the Nomes of the Secrets of the Maw DLC. She can be called to you as well in case she wanders, which she occasionally will. You get a lot of Six’s personality in this game in how her AI acts; if idle in certain places, she’ll sit down and play with a toy, carrying it around until you need her to, will whisper impatiently at you if you’re not hiding well enough, is almost always ahead of you, and generally takes a lot less risks than the average player will. That being said, Six’s personality can get a lot darker than just a snarky sidekick, but we’ll get to that.
Hand-holding.
Whereas the areas in the first game were shrouded in deep shadows only your lighter can cut through, a moody, grimy underwater nightmare, Little Nightmares II is not only a lot more expansive and well-lit than the first game, as previously mentioned, but it’s also just a drop-dead gorgeous game, even with comparison to the first. Environments are incredibly detailed in that trademark warped cartoon, claymation-y style, with a variety of great areas in the Wilderness, The School, The Hospital, The Pale City itself, and finally through the Signal Tower’s depths.
While the first game had one focused theme that connected all areas of the Maw together beautifully, with small aesthetic uniquenesses building into the world design, the second game feels a bit more disjointed, with each area having a unique gimmick rather than feeling like you’re mastering the first game’s simplistic control scheme and truly climbing out of the depths of a world sought on your demise. For example, the first chapter and second chapter of the first game, if not looked at in the chapter selection, are essentially just one area of the Maw that you can only really tell are different levels by a loading screen and an achievement that tells you you finished it.
Comparatively, each level in Little Nightmares II generally ends with a significant aesthetic shift that’s generally connected by a brief walk through a small section of the city. You get your level gimmicks, your monster(s), your final chase, and then another brief city segment pretty much in that order throughout the entire game until the end. It feels a little less immersive and more like you’re travelling through video game levels specifically crafted as video game levels and not necessarily as areas in an interconnected world, though with the much more expansive nature of the game, visual variety is definitely a good thing. It’s kind of a weird nitpick, but I love interconnectivity in game worlds with immense amounts of variety (i.e. Dark Souls, NieR Automata, Final Fantasy VII REMAKE), but with such a short runtime, Little Nightmares II can be a little more jarringly blunt in its area transitions given in doesn’t have much time to make it any smoother, which is more of the issue than the fantastic level visuals themselves.
All the different levels of Little Nightmares 2 and their aesthetics.
That being said, the visuals of the game and everything that happens in them more than makes up for the slightly more video game-y feel of the level-to-level progression. Like the first game, the visuals are generally overlaid with effects like blurs and chromatic aberration, but to compliment the game’s theme of televisions, the entire game is overlaid with a thick film grain. Lighting is also not as heavy on contrast as it is in Little Nightmares, with environmental lighting being much more actively used than light from, say, a flashlight, which you only receive and use in The Hospital, since most areas are much more populated than the first game and as such are designed as areas with residents.
Many of the set pieces are also dramatically more striking than in the first game, one of the most notable being a series of residents of the Pale City standing in a line on the roof as, one by one, they fall off, as the Signal Tower looms off in the background. Each individual level has fantastic imagery, drenched in an unnerving atmospheric and environmental detail in nearly every room.
Credit to OzCo’s Gaming.
The stuffed corpses in The Hunter’s dining room and attic, the dining hall of the school filled with Bullies smashing each other to pieces, swinging from the ceiling, throwing food, or simply being bullied themselves, The Hospital’s sheer loneliness before shocking you with easily the most terrifying part of the entire game, The Pale City’s curved-in building, all arching towards the Signal Tower, and The Transmission’s chaotic, nonsensical structures floating around in what seems like an impossible space, glowing purple light engulfing it, all of these are just small moments in a series of fantastic, haunting pieces of level design.
The striking visuals of Little Nightmares II.
Music, composed by the returning Tobias Lilja in this game is also a lot more present than it is in the first game. Six’s Theme (and all subsequent tracks that use it as a leitmotif) is really the most prominent piece of actual music in the first game, while most of the rest of the soundtrack is droning, bass, and drums, which works perfectly with the much more echo-laden, dank, smaller scale of Little Nightmares, but Little Nightmares II goes above and beyond to make each music piece feel memorable and identifiable with a much different sound to it.
Much more frantic and action-packed, fitting with the faster pace of the game, it sounds a lot more digital (going with the TV theme once more), with thick static and other digital effects and bass underlying creepy melodies in tracks like the second half of “Shopping Spasm.”
There’s a lot more strings and percussion similar to Very Little Nightmares, like the track “Claustrophobia,” sounding much more classically horrific and tense accompanied by the series staple brassy bass in tracks like “Old Friends Anew.” There’s a unique use of a lot of auxiliary percussion such as in the tracks “Crackheads” and “One Step, Two Step” to create a much more primal soundscape than the droning loneliness of the first game, as well as some incredible uses of vocals in tracks like “Signal Interference.”
However, as with the first game, with the terror comes moments of serenity, or at least a much more calm, if still creepy, moment of safety. The Main Theme, similar to Six’s Theme, serves as the leitmotif for many tracks, like “Togetherness I and II” and “Lost in Transmission,” as a more piano oriented, orchestral take on “Six’s Theme.” Other tracks, such as “Étude for A Minor” and “A Little Warmth” serve as still dark and unsettling, but briefly peaceful bits of music that give you a momentary sense of tranquility. All around, as much as I love the pure atmospheric emptiness of the first game’s soundtrack, Little Nightmares II is far and away a better OST.
Beyond the levels and music, the monster designs are great aesthetic additions, and at times upgrades, to the first game. The Hunter is a great first boss, and the first to hold a weapon that isn’t his own sheer mass over you, wearing a sack and classic hunting attire. The Teacher is probably the scariest main boss in the game, having a stiff, unending smile practically sewn onto her face, and a disturbing stretchy neck that she uses to hunt down kids normally out of reach, and the Bullies provide great tension as you carefully maneuver to destroy them.
The Doctor isn’t given a lot of time to shine, but creepily crawls around on the ceiling, shaking the entire room like a monstrously large caterpillar, with his Patients as well as their Living Hands chasing you through the most tense sequence of the game, as you must use their aversion to light to keep them away, as well as smashing the spider-like Living Hands.
The Viewers appear nearly human, but their faces have been warped beyond recognition into swirls and lumps, as if slowly getting sucked into the TVs they love more than life itself. Lastly, The Thin Man appears as a tall, slender, corpse-like man in business attire and a spiffy hat, walking at a leisurely pace as he controls the very speed of time simply by being around, but his outward appearance hides who he really is.
The much expanded roster of monsters from Little Nightmares II.
The story of the game is much more present but no less open-ended. After getting Six and making their way out of the clutches of The Hunter (by blasting him in the chest with a shotgun), the pair ride across the sea on a door to The Pale City. Mono and Six make their way through the city to the tower, passing through the school, where Six is kidnapped by Bullies before Mono saves her, an act of kindness that finally earns her trust. They travel through The Hospital (finding her classic raincoat along the way) and more of the City avoiding Viewers before finally coming across the main antagonist, The Thin Man.
Mono has been encountering televisions all throughout this game and touching them will send the boy into them, leading him to a door that almost opens before Six manages to pull him out. The final time, however, the door opens, and from it emerges the Thin Man, who promptly chases the pair before kidnapping Six, leaving Mono alone, but with the newfound power to control the televisions just as the Thin Man does.
The Thin Man takes Six.
After following Mono all throughout the city, the two soon come to a final street leading to the Signal Tower. Both of them use their powers to try to warp reality to destroy the other, but Mono ultimately wins, the man collapsing into black smoke. He drags the Signal Tower to himself, and enters.
After a series of puzzles involving listening to which door music is coming out of, you find where Six is, as a ginormous, raincoat clad monster presents itself to you, clutching onto a music box identical to the one she had in the cabin. Mono figures out that to turn her back to normal, he has to damage her music box with a mallet, after which she becomes infuriated and will attempt to kill Mono. Eventually, he manages to destroy the music box, and she returns to her usual form. The Signal Tower’s interior reveals its true form, a Lovecraftian nightmare of fleshy walls covered in staring eyes. The two manage to nearly make it, but at the last jump, Six has to catch Mono. She does, but after a moment, lets him go, betraying him as she escapes and he falls down into the fleshy abyss.
Monster Six and The Flesh Walls.
Six, throughout this game, Very Little Nightmares, and especially the first game has proven her a survivalist with how little she cares about anyone but herself, using others for personal gain. She’s generally sadistic as well, brutally severing The Janitor’s arms, choosing to eat the Nome over the sausage it offered, devouring The Lady alive, smashing a Bully’s head with her bare hands, and sitting by the fire created by The Doctor’s burning corpse as you trick him into getting into a cremation oven.
Yet, despite this, she trusted Mono and seemed genuinely concerned for him as well as appreciative when he saved her. Then, at her most vulnerable in her monster state, he betrayed her emotionally by smashing the only thing that brought her comfort in her former prison, and now trapped in her own twisted body. It’s really no wonder she made sure to look him in the eyes when she dropped him.
Credit to adam zikri.
As crawls around the flesh, he finds a chair. Unable to leave or escape, he merely sits, defeated. The screen blacks out repeatedly as time passes. Mono sits on his chair as the flesh walls recede once more over years and years and years, and finally, the boy becomes a man in a suit and hat, behind a locked door, ultimately becoming The Thin Man as the game ends the same way it began.
Mono becomes The Thin Man.
Little Nightmares II is several hours longer than the first game with a good amount of content buried within it, mostly in terms of small bits of lore you can find around the world, as well as the collectable hats for Mono, and the Glitched Remains, little remnants of children assumedly taken in The Thin Man’s hunt for Six. If you get them all, you get an extra cutscene at the end of the game in which Six leaves the tower guided by her own glitched remains, known as Shadow Six, guiding her to a poster of the Maw, revealing this game to be a prequel to the first.
If it hasn’t become clear by now, this game is an absolute masterpiece and goes above and beyond the build up garnered by the first game, which in and of itself I believe to be a phenomenal game within itself. I found it hard to actually decide which I like more but I think, in the end, Little Nightmares II is absolutely the greatest piece of the Little Nightmares universe so far, and with the confirmation that Tarsier Studios themselves would no longer be working on the series, it may also be the last piece of the puzzle we get for a long time, so let’s try to sum up the story, in theory, so far.
From here on is a summary of how I understand the story of and interpret the true meaning of Little Nightmares. If you don’t care, or want to get your own understanding by playing through the games and reading up yourself, feel free to skip to the conclusion at the bottom.
The Story of Little Nightmares (maybe)
The world of Little Nightmares revolves around Six. Like most children in this universe, she probably spent most of her childhood trying to survive as best she could, and we don’t really know much beyond that. When she was around 9, she ended up in The Nest, kidnapped and brought there to be turned into a doll by The Butler to play with The Pretender. She escapes after the Girl in the Yellow Raincoat helps her, but is unable to help the Girl back. She escapes back to the mainland on a raft.
At one point, she gets a cardigan to keep herself warm in The Wilderness, and comes across The Hunter. She nearly escapes him, but gets caught after being distracted by Mono, sitting in a tree. Mono himself has been surviving on his own before ending up in the woods. He feels bad for getting Six captured and spends a month figuring out how to get into the house to free her. He soon breaks in, and after some hesitance from Six, the two join forces to escape and stop the transmissions of the Signal Tower that have been affecting the whole world.
They grow closer and closer over the course of the game before Six is taken by The Thin Man, who, when he takes a child, leaves behind Glitched Remains, a shadow of the self that could serve as something like a soul. After evading the Thin Man and following Shadow Six, Six’s Glitched Remains, he confronts The Thin Man and kills him, awakening his power to use the TVs and control the very reality the Signal Tower has created. He enters and finds a reality filled with doors, the tower possibly showing some kind of manifestation of a person’s consciousness at its most primal, which is the form he finds Six. She’s a monstrous behemoth, and is yet at first kind to Mono, offering one of her only sources of comfort to likely the only person she’s ever trusted fully, before he has to do the unthinkable and betray her. Obviously, in this state, her first instinct is to lash out in the most dramatic way possible.
Every time he hits the music box, he’s sent to a void with just an axe and a door that he’s forced to break through, literally destroying her emotional barriers, before he ultimately destroys the music box completely, shattering the false reality and restoring Six to her full form. She slowly stands up, and just stares at Mono, and before the two can reconcile and Mono can explain himself, the two must escape. At the end, Six considers letting him up, but despite all the good he’s done for her, her apathy for others kicks in, and she lets him fall, leaving alone. Exiting the tower, her stomach growls as she sees her shadow self, seeming as though she’s still disconnected from her very soul, and sees a flyer for The Maw, a restaurant out at sea. She’s shortly after caught by The Ferryman.
Brought to The Maw like so many other children, Six somehow ends up in a suitcase in the very deepest parts of the children’s prison, perhaps having escaped the prison to live on her own in the suitcase before gaining a will to escape, but she soon finds herself making her way through the levels of the restaurant. Making her way through all sorts of danger, dealing with her sudden and extreme hunger, possibly as a result of having no soul, assuming that’s what the glitched remains theoretically are, and devouring a boy-turned-Nome who almost managed to escape as Shadow Six watches, she confronts the owner of the restaurant, The Lady. After a battle, Six gets her to the ground, and in a last bout of hunger eats her too, gaining her powers. Six looks out to sea as a boat horn echoes, bringing a new slew of guests.
At the same time, Mono sits, trapped within the tower, and ultimately becomes either the Thin Man or a successor to him, a conduit for the tower to exert its presence, but as his character description states, he seems to be searching for something, or rather, someone. Perhaps someone that, long ago, betrayed him, and the one person that could free her, and themself be betrayed.
Now, here’s where theories sort of start to kick in more prominently, and as such should be taken with a grain of salt. The most prominent theory is that the whole universe sits in a time loop beginning with the meeting of Six and Mono and ending in her betraying Mono and killing the Lady, with Mono ending up as The Thin Man, who’s trying desperately to find and trap Six before she causes his younger self to become him, but failing, the loop beginning again, a theory that’s been all but confirmed by the game itself. Six herself, to add onto this theory of inevitable loops, may also grow up to be The Lady, considering just as Mono gains The Thin Man’s powers, Six gains The Lady’s, supported by many paintings of characters that appear in prequels to the first game, as well as paintings of what appear to be a slightly older Six with long hair, perhaps created after she established herself as the new governess of the Maw.
The purpose of the Maw is never directly stated, or even why it’s a restaurant, but it seems that the children serve as both meat in the food prepared for the guests, and potential workers to be turned into Nomes. The guests themselves likely never leave the Maw, gorging themselves until they too can be used, with piles of skins near the furnace suggesting their bodies, killed likely due to overeating, continue to power the maw. The Lady herself is a very narcissistic woman, likely due to a fear of aging that seems to overtake her with her appearance in mirrors, leading to her entrapment of kids so that none can grow up to be as beautiful as she was in youth, as well as possibly sapping the life out of guests to keep herself young.
Children seem to have next to no value in the world of Little Nightmares as people, but rather as pawns to be used by the adults of the world. They’re hated and hunted and killed, miniscule and powerless compared to adults, and at its core, is what I believe Little Nightmares is about. This is a world from the eyes of mistreated children. Adults are to be feared, you should never trust anyone, and reality is cruel to those who allow themselves to be kind. Our so-called hero, Six, is a sadistic sociopath with no trust in anyone but herself, a hunger for vengeance (and food), and a streak of cruelty. Six shows that for some children, there is no comfort in life, and even those closest to them can break them down into a monster of their own creation, whether or not they meant to. A world of cruel adults creates nothing but little nightmares.
Conclusion
Little Nightmares is a fantastic series that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading and playing through, and I hope to see more from the series (a show is reportedly in development executive produced by the Russo brothers and directed by Henry Selick, famous for his work on stop-motion/claymation movies like Coraline, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and James and the Giant Peach, though there hasn’t been any news since the announcement), as well as Tarsier studios in any new IPs they create.
With such a beautifully crafted, deeply detailed, and yet, still thoroughly unsolved world, Little Nightmares is a series that I can’t wait to uncover more of. I’d recommend playing them pretty much in release order since Little Nightmares and the Titan Comics series are a great introduction the series, Very Little Nightmares is a fun, if unnecessary to play, spinoff, and Little Nightmares Comics is great in combination with Little Nightmares II to help you piece together your own understanding of the story, which I will thoroughly encourage people to do considering the sheer subjectivity of it.
This particular piece was a long time coming and I hope it’ll do for now until I get down what I hope is the best tangent yet, Silent Hill 2.
