I was floored with the presentation of this game at every turn. Every time I moved through an air duct, struggled to push open a heavy door or snuck through a drainage pipe, I was met with abominations that will haunt me for years… and I loved it.

You are a nondescript, small child in a yellow raincoat trying to go… somewhere. Along the way you are met with puzzle-like rooms that require climbing, jumping and swinging to traverse. There are some mild challenges that you’ll have to use your brain a little to overcome but nothing too difficult. (There was an instance where I got stuck enough that I had to look it up, but only once!) Most rooms are intuitive to traverse and there’s not a myriad of collectibles or anything to find (just a couple), so it’s fairly streamlined. How this game tells its story is the incredible part. There’s no dialogue, but given the dreary atmosphere, the disfigured humans and malnourished kids, you get the gist without a single word ever being spoken. You’re starving and you need to get out. Where are you going? There’s no real answer, but you can’t stay here. It’s foreboding and the monstrosities you see (and even commit) are pretty gruesome. It’s not in a gratuitous sense though as the art style does a lot of the heavy lifting in establishing the atmosphere.

Every adult human you encounter is a horribly disfigured and bloated creature. They really freaked me out. Most other kids that you see are paper thin and can barely move. It’s a stark contrast that illustrates gluttony and neglect in a very surreal way. I was floored with the presentation at every turn. It’s not just the art that gives these people their eeriness, it’s how they move. The animations for some of them gave me chills as some will stumble over themselves to get you while others will give up and crawl over each other just for a taste of you. It plays into the theme of desperation perfectly as everything points back to this central idea.

Gameplay is mostly traversal, so you could look at it as a platformer with some stealth mechanics. Puzzles aren’t really a big element, it’s mostly figuring out how to get to the next area. Some sections need a key to progress, but they’re not too hard to find. Sometimes you’ll need to distract an enemy to get to an area and I’d have liked to see more diverse puzzles here. One that made me go, “wow that’s really inventive,” involved using food to platform (you’ll know when you see it). Other than that, the gameplay isn’t anything too demanding though some platforming was slightly frustrating because of my ineptitude with depth perception.

This game had something to say and I liked listening to it talk. Many moments had my mouth hanging open in disbelief. You gotta do what you gotta do to get by and Little Nightmares is a dog eat dog world. It’s amazing that this game has so much heft to it as an artistic piece. It oozes personality from every orifice and I’d recommend this to anyone that craves a true piece of art.