REVIEW: LITTLE NIGHTMARES (NINTENDO SWITCH)

Half joy, half nightmare

All my reviews are spoiler-free. I aim to remain objective, even with the stuff I love, examining the product from all angles to provide you with the best insight I can to better inform you before you invest time or money. I try and be as brief as possible, the goal being for you to get a good idea of what to expect in a short amount of time. Thanks for dropping by!

Little Nightmares has been out on other platforms for a while now, but even though I really wanted to play it, as usual it was the Nintendo Switch version I was waiting on to give it a try. And it has now arrived in all its grotesque glory packaged with the main game and both DLC packs. So, is the $30 asking price worth a drop?

WHAT IS IT? Little Nightmares is something you’ve never seen before. It comes out of a small studio in Sweden with slightly higher production values than the average indie game in the visual department, but perhaps suffers from some of the same issues that plague other small projects, but we will get to that in a moment. The game is a puzzle platformer with survival horror elements which creates a truly unique blend and some legitimately scary moments. It’s a game that allows its creepy ambiance and subtle, intentionally-vague narrative mess with your brain in a delightsome way. Taking control of a yellow raincoated girl named Six (and later a boy simply named, ‘the Kid’), you are tasked with escaping a rickety old ship inhabited by giant, malformed humanoids with an appetite for children. These are led by The Lady, a slender woman in a Japanese kimono, and believe me when I say the run-ins with her are chilling to the bone.

GRAPHICS: Nightmares features a special kind of art style that fits the tone of the game like a glove, landing somewhere between a Tim Burton claymation and a (dark) Pixar CGI film. As it is powered by Unreal Engine 4, expect quality animations, detailed backgrounds, and dynamic lighting that really add a lot of lovely layers to the horrific experience. I found myself utilizing the Nintendo Switch photo capture button multiple times just because it looked so cool! There were noticeable frame rate drops only on a few occasions, but I never once felt like they were bad enough to detract from the game and it seemed overall to perform with equal gusto in both TV mode and handheld mode.

MUSIC: The game doesn’t feature much in the way of music, and rightly so. The sound design is spot on throughout the whole experience, mostly relying on the distant sounds of the rumble of the ship’s engines or the creaking wooden floorboards to push you into the action and it works very well. This makes the moments when music does come into play all the more intense and as it is all cleverly timed to what is going on cinematically, it made for some downright terrifying sequences.

GAMEPLAY: I’m afraid that is where the praise of the game ends. For starters, I had heard the game was short, and indeed it was. I loved every second of playing Six’s story, but believe it or not, the macabre adventure ended at somewhere around the three-hour mark. I was initially fine with this since I viewed the additional content in the included DLC packs to be part of the game and that I had merely reached the halfway mark. This turned out to be true, but unfortunately the second story, that of the Kid’s, turned out to be disappointingly boring and sometimes downright painful to get through. Six’s story was built on a pattern of moving through a linear line of rooms, each serving as a puzzle which could involve block pushing, searching for secret compartments, and other puzzle staples. However, these brain-teasers never overstayed their welcome and were frequently interspliced with heart-pounding sequences of being chased by the inhabitants of the ship. The Kid’s story on the other hand, is all of the above, only with longer puzzles and very few interactions with enemies resulting in something so dull I had to refer to an online walkthrough at times because my mind was shutting off in rebellion.

The game is also ailed with long and intrusive load times which I found to average around 30 seconds or so. I can tolerate this when loading a new area or the like, but unfortunately, it also occurs every time you die. And you will die. A lot. The matter is worsened by the fact that many of these deaths are caused by awkward camera angles not wanting to mesh with the X/Y axis most of the game operates on. Often when I needed to maneuver into the Z axis (foreground/background), depth perception mishaps caused me to walk unintentionally off high platforms or into danger I was clearly trying to avoid.    

CONCLUSION: Little Nightmares gloriously thrives when it succeeds and painfully face-plants when it fails. The first ‘main’ game following the heroine Six is compelling, terrifying, and beautifully made but jarringly short and what comes after is mediocre at best. I sincerely believe everyone should experience the first portion of the game but $30 may make it a little too hard to swallow for some. If a sale comes along though, or if you don’t mind dealing with long load times and occasionally wonky controls, you might want to consider giving this dark nightmare a spin.

SCORE: 7/10