It might not look like it, given that this is the second horror game I’ve recently reviewed here, but I wouldn’t call myself a horror fan – I get scared easily and usually don’t enjoy the feeling.
Or so I thought! As it turns out, I just don’t like gore and jump scares. Those are staples of the genre for a reason, no shade against them. I just don’t enjoy it. Thankfully, some horror games avoid those tropes, and Little Nightmares is one of those.
It’s been a while since I played the first game, which a friend gifted me, but I ended up really liking it. Now that I’ve played the sequel—how does it compare?
The first one, but scarier
If there is one thing both games excel at, it’s their unparalleled sense of dread – every room feels unnerving, every set piece more unnatural than the first one, every monster scarier than the one that came before it. The sequel nails this perfectly: it introduces three big monsters, and one group of people, each revealed gradually through background storytelling. Their introductions are slow and foreboding, making it immediately clear how bad it is to cross paths with them.
I won’t spoil them here, but if you liked the first game’s monsters, you will probably find these much more disturbing. They feel more menacing and their actions have heavier implications.
I think this is best experienced firsthand. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a horror expert, so I don’t have many points of comparison, but Little Nightmares II captures its atmosphere in a way that feels special.
Bigger, more ambiguous story
In the first game, we got a much more contained story – the entirety of it happens in “The Maw”, which I have always interpreted a ship that harvests both children and adults to create food. Since the whole process of endlessly feeding old clients to the new ones seems redundant, I always assumed that the monsters in some ways need to farm energy from the food – but who knows? The story is highly ambiguous. Still, it was all rife for speculation.
With its iconic ending and the many questions it raised, I was expected the second game to offer a something a bit more… clear
It starts off strong. We are placed outside the Maw, in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic city. We get more insight into how widespread the child abuse is – we see a hunter, a school, people watching television. The game drops plenty of hints, broadening the world of Little Nightmares beyond a single setting. The following picture, for example, has tons of implications depending on how you read the rest of the story – it might mean that someone is looking for immortality, or that someone is being sadistic, or any other number of things that would be spoiler territory.
But with a larger world comes larger questions. Are all the kids dead? Are there no sane or conscious human beings anymore? No one is fighting back? What are the monsters actually trying to achieve? Are they organized? I feel like these are natural questions given the setting. I mean, I might be wrong on this, but getting immersed in the world is harder if everything the world has to offer you is an unnerving atmosphere – sure, I got scared in some moments, but at some moments, the lack of finer details about the world started to frustrate me.
For example (and this gets into mild spoiler territory – skip to the next section if you don’t want spoilers), one chapter takes place in a school – all the students are made of porcelain and attack you on sight. …Why? Are they being educated to be sent to The Maw? Are they brainwashed? Is this an army? Why are they made of porcelain? Did they use to be flesh-and-blood kids like the player character?
The game doesn’t care about these questions. It uses them as a backdrop for scares and then moves on. I get that ambiguity adds to tension, but I think the devs got lost in the sauce here – and this is only the second chapter in a five-chapter game.
Questions just got piled up as I advanced through the story, and instead of being scared or anxious, I started getting frustrated. Just the ending has videos with almost a dozen theories as of now describing what happened or why (example). At some point I started to feel like the devs don’t actually have a strong grasp on this world either, and we’re destined to just keep it at “vibes” forever.
That is not the only thing that frustrated me, though.
More ways to play, frustrating puzzles
Little Nightmares II brings an AI companion, whose identity is left ambiguous for a good portion of the game. I’m not sure if the game was trying to make this into a pseudo escort mission, but I think she is a fine addition gameplay-wise. At the very least, it seems to tell us that there are more kids in the story and that they want to escape. Puzzle-wise though, puzzles involving both of you are repetitive – a lot of times she is only used as an extra ladder to push you into some other platform, and at some point I got tired of “wait for the AI to place themselves” puzzle.
In regard to how the game plays from moment to moment: Little Nightmares II falls flatly into the “puzzle platformer” genre, which makes it very accessible for newcomers: as of late, I have been playing games with my roommate, who’s a casual gamer. Watching her struggle with Hollow Knight has made me appreciate accessible design—she loves the game despite barely being able to play it.
Puzzles work almost the same as in the first game. You try to piece something about the environment and try to advance the kid to the next room, often discovering how decrepit the whole world is in the process, and probably pushing your suspension of disbelief as to all the convenient ways you are able to just barely proceed. A major addition to this game is “combat”, and I do mean that in quotation marks: combat is clunky, and more frustrating than tense.
While puzzle platformers should be accessible, since its progression is not mechanically-based, there are sections of the games that break this design – and not in a good way.
The game very early on gives you a weapon. You pick it up, slowly, then press A, slowly again swinging it in front of you. It’s not bad in the first part of the game, but as the game progresses and more challenges are thrown at you, including sections with multiple enemies, the wonky controls start being an obstacle to your continuing. It’s, again, frustrating, not tense.
There are also sections of the game which border on just trial and error. Take for example, the next picture:
That bucket swings from the ceiling when you walk across this room. There is, to my knowledge, no indication that it will actually come down – it just does, and it hits you, and you need to restart. These goddamn buckets are much more frequent than what they need to be. On top of that, a lot of puzzle in the latter third of the game feel like glorified “Where’s Waldo” sequences – more frustrating than engaging.
This might 100% be a me problem, but by the end of Chapter 4 I was already checked out from the game and I just wanted to get it done, and if comments on this video are any indication, I am not alone with this.
Many sections of the game are therefore repetitive. In a game like this, you don’t truly want your players to be challenged, right? As that takes away from the atmosphere. You want them to feel threatened but never get actually “stuck” in one of the high-stakes scenarios. Little Nightmares II fails at this – a lot of its section I’ll remember with frustration, not awe or dread.
Grander than the first one, even in its flaws
Little Nightmares II is almost twice as long as the first one; Steam (which slightly inflates my playtime since I sometimes leave the game running) clocked it at 8 hours for me. For comparison, Steam clocks my two runs of the first game at 12 hours. For a lot of people, that might be a good thing, but the way I engaged with it made me wish it wasn’t as long, as the first half of the game was when I was enjoying myself the most.
Unlike the first game, which had a singular setting and clear stakes – we had Six’s hunger, her immediate escape from The Maw, and her eventual adoption of The Lady’s power – the sequel expands its world without anchoring to anything. The creep factor is elevated, but it lacks a clear thematic backbone which makes it feel like a collection of eerie set pieces rather than a fully realized story.
This picture of the player character is one of the many questions the game leaves hanging. You have some sort of power with electrical transmissions, but the nature of your power, as well as how it relates to one of the game’s antagonists, is never delved upon. In the first game, the exact mechanism of how Six obtains The Lady’s power is unimportant, but here, there are more questions raised about it than what is shown to us.
By the end of Little Nightmares, I was invested – tense and in awe at what was happening. At the end of Little Nightmares II, I was just frustrated, and simply wanted it to be over, despite being a much creepier game.
Final Verdict
If you loved the first game, you will probably enjoy this one. If you’re a fan of environmental storytelling, I’d say this is still a must-play despite its pitfalls. Overall, it’s a strong entry, even if I didn’t vibe with all of its elements.
What do you think, though? Do you think it’s better composed than I give it credit for? Do you think the game benefits from leaving so many questions unanswered? Let me know down in the comments!
