#Little nightmares fanfiction series#

There's a sense of mounting dread to that scene, as your ruse could fall apart at any second, forcing you to have to outrun a terrifying number of enemies. In one of my favorite moments in the game, you don a disguise and sneak through a room filled with dozens of enemies-the most you've seen at once at this point in the game. Tarsier uses this unsettling art design to terrific effect. These characters are unsettling in a way reminiscent of the darker Jim Henson works like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, and the visual similarity to puppetry helps sell the dark fantasy that you are a child in a frightening, violent world. In Little Nightmares II, you will be alternately hunted by all kinds of monsters, from a larva-shaped man who clings to the ceiling and chows down on dead bodies to a monstrous schoolmarm with sharp teeth and a veiny neck that can stretch almost endlessly in pursuit of prey. While the environmental art aims for realism, the enemy designs are grotesquely cartoonish.

The rain and lighting effects set the tone for the world, one that leaves you feeling vulnerable. I particularly enjoyed a platforming section that had me evading a monster by climbing across sprawling bookshelves in a library that, from my tiny perspective, seemed impossibly big. The settings that you jump and climb through have a moody sense of crumbling realism. Stellar art direction helps sell the creepy, toylike world of Little Nightmares II. The overall effect is such that you simultaneously feel like a kid-maybe a sadistic one like Sid from Toy Story, but a kid nonetheless-playing with toys in their toybox and like the toys themselves. Walk close enough to the camera and your character will hit an invisible fourth wall. If you move the camera far enough to the left or right, up or down, you can see the black space where the room ends.

#Little nightmares fanfiction series#

Since the release of the first entry in 2017, the Little Nightmares series has combined the dark and the playful, casting players as little kids in a world of big and powerful monsters. But, regardless of your past experience with the series, there is a catharsis inherent in these rare moments when our fragile characters finally get a chance to fight back. These moments are especially effective if you've played the previous game. There are other moments like this, where Tarsier takes what you thought you knew and suddenly upends it, leaving you shocked and sputtering. For example, with there being no weapons in the first game, I was shocked when, during the first chapter, the solution for dealing with a vicious pursuer was to pick up a shotgun with my AI companion, Six, and shoot our stalker dead. Many of Little Nightmares II's best moments are structured like jokes: tense build-up released by a climactic surprise. As the player, you may want to play in this world, but Mono's clear motivation is to find a painless route to safety. Tarsier's imaginatively brooding art helps to sell this story. Though Little Nightmares 2 tells its story wordlessly, we can easily intuit Mono's goal: escape. His horrifying adventure takes him out of the woods and through a frightening cityscape haunted by humans who have turned into frightening parodies of mundane occupations, like a teacher whose watchful eyes dart at the end of a long, distended neck. From the moment we first meet Mono, alone in the woods, he is vulnerable. Lasting relief, however, is nowhere to be found on Mono's journey. I climbed onto the light, and used the impromptu step stool to hop the barrier, marveling at the way developer Tarsier Studios had cleverly used a colorful environmental detail as a hint for a puzzle-a joke where a sigh of relief greeted the punchline instead of laughter. Sure enough, the light fixture whooshed over my head, hit the barrier, and came to a halt.

When I respawned, I set the pressure plate off again and crouched down. 'I wonder if I can.' I thought, eyeing the nearby toy, '.duck.' Once the checkpoint reset, I tried again, attempting to quickly run away from the floorboard before the pendulum fell. I turned to run just as a metal light fixture swung down from the ceiling, smashing me into the barrier and killing me. When I approached, the floorboard the duck was sitting on sunk into the floor.

Behind it, there was an oaky barrier, formed from leaning one table against another-too tall for my character, a tiny child named Mono, to climb. A dim spotlight from somewhere above shone on its reflective wings. It was the kind of carved, wooden plaything that kids drag around on a piece of twine, with wheels where the real waterfowl's webbed feet would be. About an hour into Little Nightmares II, I found a toy duck resting on a hardwood floor.