Little Nightmares 2
Developer Tarsier Studios Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Switch, Xbox Series Release Out now
At times, Little Nightmares 2 feels a little lost in the woods. While a menacing work of architecture and lighting, it lacks the obscene overall cohesion of the 2017 original, in which you guide a small girl, Six, through the workings of an enormous meat factory. It sometimes feels more like a DLC season, in fact, with levels knocking rather than locking together. This is especially true of the opening forest area, where new poster boy Mono bursts out of a mysterious television. Beginning your seven-hour journey to the right, you find Six trapped in the house of an ogreish Hunter. It’s a delightful quagmire of a level, a greasy reincarnation of Limbo’s wilderness, but it’s also a prelude, geographically and thematically detached from the warping Pale City where most of the game is set. For all his gruesome, sewn-together appearance, the Hunter is a mild letdown next to the original’s denizens, chasing you with a shotgun in the first of many frenzied getaway sequences.
Things pick up quickly, however, when Mono and Six arrive the ghastliness lies partly in how the emphasis on stealth forces you to study her, lurking behind a jar of formaldehyde as the creature stuffs organs into anatomical models, or raps the fingers of errant pupils. is one of a few horror games that gets away with leaving its monsters in full view, because the horror of them isn’t about simple grotesqueness but witnessing and, despite yourself, understanding their work. Each of the game’s simple door-and-key puzzles ― obtaining fuses for a powerbox, finding a hammer to smash through boards ― is as much an exercise in fleshing out your adversary’s habits as opening the path.
