Little Nightmares Review: Sleep Tight

Think back as a child when absolutely anything and everything was the scariest thing ever to your imagination. The inner child could see the smallest thing as the biggest giant or even worse. Well that’s somewhat the concept of Little Nightmares just a bit darker.

In Little Nightmares you play as a little girl named Six, a nine year old little girl that becomes trapped in the “Maw” after being lured by food due to her hungriness. In this roughly 5-6 hour campaign you must do everything possible to make it out and survive the horrors of what waits around every corner.

The twist to this horrific adventure is the lack of jump scares, providing and requiring more unique tactics based on trial and error. Six needs to get across blocked passageways and climb lengths higher than her little arms can reach. And each room you enter is a puzzle with some of the most interesting and intriguing methods causing you to stretch your brain to evade enemies and objectives.

As you’d expect from a little girl that’s scared and trying her best to evade trouble around every corner, you rely on her breathing to determine her stress level and her wits to make it through the side-scrolling platformer.

What type of enemies can you expect within this side-scrolling adventure? Plenty from a Freddy Kruger look alike, just not from Elm Street, an over-sized Cabbage Patch reject and more. As for sneaking past them is all about timing, which isn’t necessarily always on your side. Move at the wrong moment and prepare to not only be captured but tortured and/or mutilated in the most sickening ways imaginable. In so many words, you’re not Alice and this isn’t Wonderland.

It’s a fascinating, yet frightening adventure as you attempt to live, hide in the shadows and hopefully find your next meal while trying to escape. But another terrifying factor is the loading times between chapters. The fun factor is slightly lost as it takes quite a bit to load leaving you, the gamer, to wait longer than some would expect or anticipate.