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Little nightmares character descriptions. Review of Little Nightmares. New gaming experience

Six is a vulnerable creature, like a kitten from. She doesn’t know how to do anything and won’t learn anything - she just jumps around, grabs onto ledges, squats into corners and inquisitively feels objects. I lovingly scattered blocks, dolls throughout the rooms, and didn’t even forget a toy train. No less common are rolls of toilet paper, stained refrigerators, neat framed photographs of toilets, and tiles with streaks of rust - grotesque signs of the cult of consumption.

The game relies exclusively on visual language, the beginning and ending are open - there is no escaping the trend glorified by . True, if you forgive the abruptness (the Danish creation provides answers to at least some questions), then it is a carnival of half-revelations and dirty tricks, similar to those used by the creators of the series “The Walking Dead” to delay the intrigue.

Six must overcome five zones, darting through the guts of ventilation, bumping into timid gnomes in caps and rats and reviving kerosene lamps and candles with a lighter. On the lower tiers, the Guardian looking after the child prisoners does not need light - this long-armed monster with a grin from ear to ear is blind and reacts to rustles and creaking floorboards. It frightens with its guttural howling and monstrous limbs dragging along the floor - the only time the Swedes got right with the fears from my childhood. Surely there will be something original for you too.

The actions of the “thumbelina” are simple: they ran to the switch if the grille-door is energized, they found the key if they saw the lock. Sometimes you have to throw an object to reach a button - the TV that was turned on by throwing a can caused particular bewilderment. Don't try this at home.

The only “puzzle with a twist” worthy of showing off on the same pedestal with riddles from and will meet you in the kitchen. It's run by two grimy cooks who eschew hygiene. The giants' sedentary lifestyle boils down to scratching their three chins and sluggishly washing industrial mountains of plates (although the boar guests actually prefer to put everything in their mouths with bare hands straight from the unwashed countertop) and crumbs of meat, sometimes live - mummy bags arrive here on a hook-handed conveyor belt from the previous location, where the children are watched over by an unsightly Guardian. If the cooks catch the girl, they will immediately inflict reprisals - say, throw her into a boiling pot.

Despite the duration of 4-5 hours (even without arcade training, which will require races on the tables from gentlemen with weak muscles and thick wallets), it does not seem compact. In my opinion, a comprehensive adventure. You’re unlikely to go through it a second time, and even to help such a heroine... I personally wouldn’t raise my hands, because the ending is more discouraging than in . Let me play as the gnomes!

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It was announced in the spring of 2014, even before, so it cannot be called a Swedish clone of the Danish hit. To some extent, an original “platformer” with puzzles, not without flaws and charm - that would be more accurate.

It was called “Hunger” and therefore the main driving force in the game was the feeling of hunger. And although the new work from the Tarsier studio changed during the development process, some details of the original idea remained. For example, endless hunger and the idea of sticking a small, harmless person into the dark big world.

The independent Swedish studio Tarsier is primarily known for its adventure platformers, which include games such as LittleBigPlanet, Statik, Tearaway Unfolded - in general, fans of this genre will not need to introduce such projects in more detail.

Nevertheless, new project called Little Nightmares is both similar and different from previous games. The developers claim that the meaning of their new project was born out of two different ideas: a dollhouse and a vile feast. Therefore, merging together, the game Little Nightmares was born.

Womb in the Womb

The womb is a creepy, mysterious and incredibly disgusting place where the harmless main character of the game finds herself. You can understand what it is only if you get out of it. From the inside, the Maw looks like a prison, a hellish kitchen and just an abandoned place. But if we rely on the promotional material, then we can say that the Womb is a small underwater city that comes to the surface every few years and welcomes new “guests”. Guests are fat, weak-willed creatures who are obsessed with only one thought - to eat. And yes, it sounds rude, but there is no other way to describe it: all these “guests” are disgusting, and what they eat is simply creepy.

“The slippers are obviously too big for the heroine, but for this comrade they are just right.”

There are more monsters surrounded by Six than in any ordinary house - it’s not every day that a feast is held! Moreover, the most harmless of these monsters are “leeches”. They will always try to strangle a little girl in cold blood, of course, if they catch up. The huge and clumsy friends of the local cook will instantly send Six to dismemberment, and the long-armed Watchman will best case scenario will put him in a cage with other lifeless “specimens”.

So, in addition to guests, staff and the unknown Mistress, there are also Nomes - funny, cute and harmless little creatures with caps on their heads, which you need to look for and simply hug during the passage. The game won’t tell you why to do this, but apparently it’s important. The rest, as they say, is up to you to figure out.

However, you shouldn’t be surprised by such a presentation of the plot, because it won’t tell you anything at all: how fashionable it has become today - you’ll have to figure everything out on your own. In part, Little Nightmares in this regard is similar to Inside or even, where the same atmosphere of mystery and constant danger is maintained. In such games, it seems that now the points of insight will accumulate and everything will fall into place, but no, this will not happen.

“There will be plenty of terrible places in Little Nightmares. Here, for example, is a place with shoes from the less fortunate prisoners of the Maw.”

The world of the Womb is more reminiscent of the world or city of Rapture from the series. As for the style, it is again more reminiscent of the no less gloomy Inside. Therefore, a significant part of the game will have to be spent in gloomy and terribly colored locations, where the only bright light is the yellow cloak of the main character. However, like the scarlet shirt of the boy from. After all, even the layout of these games has similar features: the presented world is divided into pieces, like some kind of doll's house.

“Perhaps this is some kind of allusion to modern society, which endlessly consumes something.”

Recently, it has become fashionable again to make horror platformers with a depressing atmosphere and unusual visual style. Just remember the one that made gamers and critics fall in love with it. The developers faced a rather difficult task - to make a game that does not copy other puzzle platformers, and at the same time give gamers an unforgettable experience.

Horror without explanation

Before we start talking about the game itself, I would like to tell a little background of this project. The fact is that initially Little Nightmares was called and did not have an official publisher. But after some lull, the game changed its name and received financial support from Bandai Namco, which saw a great future in the project.

The game itself is made in such a style that we have to find out everything ourselves - where we need to come up with a story, turn on our imagination and pretty much train our imagination. From the very beginning, no one explains anything to us. Before us is the main character named Six and a gloomy unknown world, which is the Maw - an underwater vessel that conceals many secrets and hides dangerous monsters. There are no cutscenes, notes or other materials that can explain the essence of what is happening in Little Nightmares, and this is amazing, because no script or spectacular video can compare with the raging imagination that simply boils with everything seen in the game.

The main character of the game is a little girl who is “little” in the literal sense. Everything around is very huge, and Sixth can easily fit even into a small suitcase. The inhabitants of the in-game world are also generally of impressive size, which is why it is easy to guess that as soon as we catch the eye of our enemy, he will be able to crush us without much difficulty. Apparently this part of the game migrated from the LittleBigPlanet series, to which Tarsier Studios once had a hand.

However, the atmosphere in Little Nightmares is not at all as fun and friendly as in the Sackboy games. Here, from the first minutes of playthrough, we understand that the world of the game is saturated with evil and suffering, and we are just a small dessert in it, which will easily be swallowed if no measures are taken.

Hide or die

You can't fight enemies in the game, instead, most of the time we have to either run away from them or move stealthily, hiding behind various objects so as not to get caught. In this, the game is very similar to the already mentioned Inside, where a meeting with an enemy almost always also ended in failure for the main character. Speaking of enemies, one cannot fail to mention their appearance- the monsters are varied and drawn in a very unconventional way. When we see our opponents, we immediately get the impression that we are dreaming and seeing some kind of nightmare that has no meaning, but causes great anxiety.

The artists of Little Nightmares did their best, since in addition to memorable opponents, the game also has interesting locations through which you can move in three-dimensional mode, but with a side view. This, of course, sometimes makes it difficult to get through some moments, given that from time to time you can inadvertently perform a false action.

There is a lot of stealth in the game, but besides it there are also puzzles. They are made quite simply and cause more disappointment than positive impressions. There’s practically no need to use your brain, since puzzles mostly involve searching a certain subject or some illogical interaction with him. In general, there is nothing interesting in the puzzles, unfortunately.

You shouldn't expect any variety from Little Nightmares; it simply doesn't exist in the game. The passage is straightforward, except perhaps for the behavior of the opponents. Enemies will always behave differently, which forces us to adapt to the situation. For example, if we were previously hiding in a certain place, and then we climb there again, the enemy will not fall for this trick twice and will easily find us.

There is no musical accompaniment in Little Nightmares as such, but instead we often hear the characters singing, which only enhances the overall atmosphere. Ambient sounds are fine, both in terms of sounds made by enemies and when interacting with objects.

New gaming experience

A serious downside to the game is the controls. Very often the heroine does not listen to us when we want to perform a certain action. Considering that sometimes you need to react as quickly as possible to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy, poor communication with the character causes considerable irritation. When playing on a gamepad, there are much fewer such shortcomings, but they are not completely absent.

In terms of pictures, Little Nightmares is something amazing. It's not even about technical side graphics, but about the visual style, in which everything is done as well as possible. The game world is so carefully and thoughtfully created that immersion in the gameplay occurs immediately. The game seems to know what can really surprise us, and constantly does it throughout the entire playthrough.

Unfortunately, the passage does not last long - 3-4 hours, depending on the desire to explore the locations. However, the hours we spend in the game are imprinted in our memory and allow us to gain a completely new experience. This is not to say that the game is completely free of shortcomings. These primarily include a short duration, weak puzzles and sometimes inconvenient controls. However, you close your eyes to all this when you are imbued with the strong atmosphere of the game.

Little Nightmares seems to isolate us from the outside world for several hours and plunge us into a childhood nightmare, the way out of which depends only on our ability to overcome obstacles. The game cannot be called completely scary, but it is certainly disturbing, since traveling around the world is always accompanied by live clashes with enemies and new unforgettable experiences.

A little boy walks through strange factories, prisons, laboratories. He walks in an unknown manner and for an unclear purpose, and is followed on his heels scary looking people and carnivorous monsters. Yes, you just read a recap of the game Inside, which came out in the middle of last year. Replace a boy with a girl and you get description of Little Nightmares, and exhaustive at that. Playdead - the developer-publisher of Inside and Limbo - could very well reach an agreement with Tarsier Studios to pitch its Little Nightmares as the third part of the "nightmare trilogy". The same strange world where nothing is clear, a plot that no one wants to explain or reveal, almost identical gameplay with running away from rays of light and moving objects, switching levers and jumping on platforms, searching for secrets and a lot of puzzle-like casualness so that the buyer, Good thing, I didn’t demand a refund when I came across a difficult problem.

The first and main difficulty that the player faces is not even planned by the authors. It is not connected at all with puzzles and not with villains thirsting for maiden flesh. The fact is that as soon as you die (even if you fail somewhere, or even fall into the clutches of someone), the game helpfully begins to load the checkpoint. You will definitely start to hate, start to despise these downloads. They'll most likely be the reason you'll want to burn Little Nightmares along with Xbox One(on other systems the problem is much less radical). The shortest loads last a minute, the longest - three, but sometimes thirty seconds pass between restoring at a checkpoint and the next loss and you spend more time admiring the black loading screen than playing.

Add save points yourself. Either the authors will throw the character three or four rooms before the place of death and will have to run through them again, completing already completed and not very original tasks, or they will load the game right before they try to capture the heroine. You will be provided with pain in all places that are interesting from an anatomical point of view.

The visual style redeems such a dubious achievement. Beautiful gloomy scenery with distorted proportions and shapes, exaggerated enemies, eerie sound and fast, dynamic switching of locations - the game flies by quickly, much faster than it manages to get boring or infuriating with shortcomings. In addition, it’s even more convenient to admire than Inside: the heroine moves in three dimensions and can examine amazing rooms with a free camera.

In this three-dimensionality lies another complexity gameplay. The path along which the main character strides widely can suddenly become narrower and find itself devoid of comfortable railings - and now the heroine flies into the abyss, not quite understanding how she got into trouble. Don't expect a fun and simple walk - the game will not affect your, no doubt, high intelligence, but it will definitely make you sweat and get nervous.

And especially don’t expect a sweet and kind story about the victory of a little good over evil. This is not a children's horror story, but a completely philosophical drama about how evil can only be defeated by an even stronger, more terrible and cruel evil. The heroine's adventures are a descent into hell not in order to be cleansed, but in order to take advantage of it and get back out. If you can accept this, you will be delighted with Little Nightmares. For everyone else, there are lighter and kinder games. And here we have, excuse me, death, guts, cannibalism. And we like it.

The developers from the Swedish studio Tarsier have already established themselves as creators of deep and atmospheric indie platformers (and at times, creepy). And now, we have before us their new project called Little Nightmares. It's a side-scrolling platformer, but it's also 3D. There are similarities here with the studio’s previous works and even more with the projects of colleagues, for example, the game Among the Sleep. But despite this, this world looks original enough to make you want to plunge into it. As often happens, there is a touch of Tim Burton's style here, although this is denied by the design team.

In fact, players here will experience a mixture of horror and tenderness, solve puzzles, hide and overcome obstacles from room to room. This is in a general sense. But let's look at all the components of the game in more detail.

Plot

Main character Little games Nightmares is a little girl in a yellow raincoat with the strange name Six. Why Six and why she’s wearing a raincoat is a mystery that will probably become clearer at the end (here, as in the case of Among the Sleep, you shouldn’t throw spoilers, because the whole point is in the mystery). The girl is small in every sense. After getting out of the suitcase in which she was locked, Six finds herself in the world of the Maw. All ordinary objects and furniture here are huge in size. The player feels really small, and the camera angles only contribute to this. But if only this. The world itself is full of disgusting monsters and creepy places. To the ominous music, it gives you goosebumps. For Six, the Womb is a prison from which one must escape by any means. However, the local inhabitants do not perform the role of special guards, but live their own lives and activities (cooking food, collecting scary collections, doing everyday tasks). However, meeting any of them face to face (with the exception of a couple of neutrals) threatens the Sixth Death or more severe imprisonment. You must always move stealthily. On tiptoe.

Again, when compared with Among the Sleep (reviewed this winter), although the idea is similar, the differences are significant. Yes, this is the same embodied world of childhood nightmares as there. But here everything is less surreal. This is not just the world through the eyes of a two-year-old child, when you generally understand that you are in some kind of illusion, and nightmares are caused only by perception. Here, it seems like really real, disgusting monsters and terrible situations actually happen (although, who knows... who knows... the mysteries will be revealed by the end). The central character here is not some standardized kid, but a charismatic and touching girl in her own way. Yes, we won’t see her face and won’t hear dialogues (they are not here), but still, there is a personality behind this figure. And this person is quite fearless. She is more afraid of hunger than of the disgusting monsters she meets along the way. Her yellow raincoat, movements and manners are made at 5. The character is bright and memorable in itself, without any conversations or biographies. By the way, there are no notes, plot items, or anything else here either. The player will reveal all the mysteries of this universe from the events that take place.

Bottom line: the world is strange, mysterious, scary. But the intrigue and desire to find out the truth “What kind of place is this” will force the player to spend several hours behind it. As usual, in such projects, the game is short, about 3-4 hours. This is unless you get stuck on complex puzzles, which is unlikely to happen.

Graphic arts

One of Little Nightmares' strong points is its visual style. Everything is done gloomily, but without excesses. There is a place for some beauty, and some monsters can be considered not only disgusting, but also funny in their own way. It’s simply impossible to resist comparisons with Tim Burton, no matter how the developers protest. This is exactly the kind of mysticism, grotesqueness, and humor that is here. In some rooms, the focus of the image is very well placed, where the general background may be blurred. There are very dark rooms. Fortunately, a lighter in Six’s pocket will always save you. What's most memorable is the contrast between the gloomy, dark surroundings and the girl's bright yellow raincoat. The effect of a ray of light in a dark world. Always evokes subconscious metaphors.

Result: stylish, high quality, interesting. It's like watching a horror cartoon. The designers perfectly preserved this theme throughout.

Gameplay Little Nightmares

The gameplay involves a girl in dark rooms solving puzzles, sneaking through monsters, and overcoming physical obstacles. As for the enemies, there is almost always complete stealth. There can be no talk of any use of force. Hide and run. The puzzles are varied and often thought-provoking. For example, you need to climb into an opening at the top of a wall, but there are no ladders or ropes. But there is a large meat grinder, and if you hang it on the lever and turn it, it produces sausages, they hang along the wall in a bunch. But two sausages are not enough and you need to drag large pieces of meat from the previous room in order to make a sausage rope for lifting. Difficult? This is one of the simplest examples. Although, for fans of such platformers, these riddles will seem, on the contrary, too easy. But the lack of even small clues is a serious problem. Would be. But fortunately, not in the age of the ubiquitous Internet.

Conclusion

Just a good and atmospheric indie platformer. Fascinating beauty and mystery. The theme of children's nightmares is perfectly explored, more varied than in similar games. It is recommended for all those who like to tickle their nerves (not really much), to train their logic and ingenuity. There are no complaints about the implementation of the idea.