Little Nightmares (PS4): Only a little.

I took a swing on this one at the recommendation of my siblings. I'll be 100 percent honest going in I didn't really know anything about it. But since its an indie game, going by its title and I had a general idea. But I never really had the opportunity to play it. It was always kinda on my back burner. Well after a random flash sale had the complete version down to 10 bucks, I figured why the hell not.

LITTLE NIGHTMARES: COMPLETE EDITION(PS4)

As is the case with a number of these types of games, we don't get a whole lot of story to start with and are left to figure it out as we play. When we start the game, we are greeted by a dark and foggy screen. As the fog begins to clear we see the form of a person start to take shape. Clearing further we make out that it appears to be a geisha in a kimono, and slowly she starts to turn to the camera. 

Eventually she sharply faces the 4th wall, and we cut to a small child (named Six apparently) jarring awake from sleep. She is tiny if less than a foot tall, wearing a yellow raincoat with a hood that covers her face. She is currently trapped on a traveling ship called "the Maw" and after awakening, leaves to find an escape.

Honestly, after the waking up the game pretty much immediately begins and I really only have Wikipedia to confirm that the location is called the maw, and I'm basically just guessing that she is trying to escape.  Pretty much from the word go you take control of the game so any story that you can gather comes from the pieces you can put together as you proceed along the game. 

And right from the word go, and rather unsurprisingly, Little Nightmares confirms what I guessed and that the play is that of the spooky indie puzzle platformer variety a la Limbo, Unravel, or Inside.  Its got a pretty functionally simple control scheme for the most part, although I will say some button combo's don't feel very intuitive which I will get into later.

You use your analog to move, you have jump button, a run button, and grab so you can pick up objects and pull levers. If you have played the aforementioned Limbo or Inside the control scheme is going to feel very familiar to you. There is also a button to crouch and sneak/slide but for the most part these indie platformers really like to stick to simple game design and sell their product with impressive visuals and subtle story telling.

I will say though, unlike the previous two titles I've compared to, Little Nightmares operates on a full three dimensional plane, so you aren't just moving left or right like a classic Mario game. When you press up or down, you move in the fore and background. Some of the maps will require you to change your directions, and there are some chase sequences that involve this as well. It only became a point of frustration when trying to tightrope on some pathway, veering too far up or down, and falling off and usually falling to my death.

Little Nightmares is pretty fair with checkpoints though, so if you do happen to bumble with ledge like that, you can count on being respawned relatively close to where you fell in the first place so its not going to set you back too far. Honestly with the exception of one section of the game, this was the way I most frequently died until I adjusted to the control scheme.

It's not a very long game either, and I'm waffling if that is to its benefit or detriment. Full story, with no DLC chapers is about 5 levels long and holds roughly about a 2-3 hour play time. Granted its not a full release, but Inside managed to cram 8 hours into their game. The question is what is the appropriate length for a game like this, because I will be the first to admit that after a while it felt like Inside was getting a little too long. Now, that is just on my assessment of the start to finish of the main game. There are 3 DLC levels I have not got to yet and that might appropriately flesh out length, although for a game this size it probably couldn't have hurt to just include it in the main game.

During the course of gameplay there are handful of different "collectibles" you can gather for trophies. As you play through the game there are lanterns to light, little geisha dolls you can smash, and then if you look in the nooks and crannies, little people called Nooms skitter away and hide. But if you can find where they end up hiding you can pick them up and give them a hug, which I think changes the ending slightly? I have been told there is only one ending, which is a little disappointing. Since this is one of those games without scripts they could have tweaked the ending to chance the subtext. Would have added some replayability to a shorter game. This worked really well in the early Atelier series, and would have done well here too.

It's got a very interesting visual style, as most of these indie platformers do. While streaming it my mom (yes my mom watches my stream, I'm popular), she described it as a darker version of The Borrowers. If I had to describe its visual style, I would say its as if Tim Burton did his take on the Spirited Away. With the exception of the Geisha, the nooms, and Six, all the of the enemies in this game have this bloated or grotesque form to them to the point where it looked like they were wearing skin that isn't theirs. It certainly has a fucked up look that supplements the dark tone of the game well.

Seriously, I think this exact blocking occurs in a Studio Ghibli movie.

There really isn't a lot for me to nitpick here either. The game is dark, but with an title like Little Nightmares I guess I was expecting the game to be scary. It really wasn't. Dark, oppressive, somber, but it really wasn't scary. Again, a nitpick at best, because I don't think being scary was the games intention. It really just wanted a dark undertone, and it basically nails it there.

I've already complained about the length of the game somewhat, but the length can be subjective really. A few hours can be the perfect length for some, but 5 levels for 20 bucks? 8 levels for 30? I dunno, despite me getting it on sale for less I still can't help but feel a little bit of short changed. I paid about 10 for the complete edition of the game and that seemed like more fair price to me.

The biggest issues I had with the game through is that some of the mechanics don't feel like they were properly optimized. The crouch and grab are on the shoulders and run and jump are on the face buttons. Despite them being in the positions where you would typically find these buttons in other games, they never felt natural to me in a way that felt right. I could run and jump with ease, but if I needed to slide or grab something on the fly (like climb a chain) holding down the trigger never felt natural to me. I would lose my grip, or fail to grab something.

But the biggest frustrations I had came in the 4th level in a spot that wasn't even really a puzzle.  There is a segment where you basically have run across a table and avoid gorging heavy patrons or else they will shove you into their mouth. Once you do this, you need to leap off the table to a climbable wall. The problem I was having is I was having real issues with the grab radius. When you see something reach with full extent of their arm, by most video game logic you would think that you have safely found the range to avoid losing in this segment. This is not the case here, and the grabs were always just a bit more than I expected them to be. So in trying to avoid getting grabbed, I would walk right into the range of another.

This was only made even more frustrating from when I reached the end, when I would go to make the jump, the physics would not consider me close enough, and basically glitch push me away from the wall. This happened to me like 3 or 4 times which made me think that there was a different solution to get past this area. So naturally, while exploring some other option I was constantly getting killed in the same spot of what otherwise would be a pretty easy game and it was getting immensely frustrating. Lo and behold I actually just needed to step one more step off the ledge to actually get the distanced needed to clear this jump. Fucking annoying.

But if I am being honest I really can't hold that as a point against it, because it was me playing poorly. The circumstance caused a clipping that made me think it was just a poor design, but when pulling clips it really was just my goof. But all things considered It didn't really mar my experience with the game, just added a pointless 20 minutes of fuckuppery.

At the time of writing I haven't gone back and finished the DLC chapters yet, but I intend to do so. All in all I would say that I enjoyed my time with Little Nightmares but I wouldn't say it blew the doors off for me. That isn't the negative knock it sounds like though. The gaming market place is getting pretty flush with arty, minimalistic story platformers. I basically had an idea of what I was getting into when I started this game and it was exactly what I got. I will say the story wasn't what I expected it to be so that was the pleasant surprise.

I honestly really don't have much more I can expound upon here. Little Nightmares is a pretty solid game, although perhaps a little pricier than I would have liked if not on sale. If you are into this style of platformer the it is going to check all the boxes for you. If you are looking for something with a little more meat on it, I would advise for the complete edition of the game.