Imagine, if you will, that you are a young child. You wake up to your bedroom enveloped by darkness, leaving behind a dream that you can’t quite remember. You throw the blankets off of yourself, deciding you’re rather thirsty. You leave the safety of your room, your bed, and carry yourself into the danger of your house in the middle of the night. You can’t turn on the lights, lest you wake up your family. In the little moonlight that streams into the dark house, the furniture seems to stretch and deform, making frightening shadows, the monsters reflected on the walls far bigger than your child form. You hear noises that you’d normally ignore in daylight where you are safe. As you are blindly filling a glass of water, you hear footsteps. You turn and see a large figure making its way through the darkness. The form towers over the already oversized furniture, could you outrun it?
Little Nightmares is a horror game series developed by Tarsier Studios. It spans over two main installments (with a third on the way) as well as a mobile game (Very Little Nightmares), a podcast, and a short webcomic series. It’s a video game franchise full of bizarre twists and turns that’s been taking up space in my brain long after I originally stumbled across it. But what is it about this game that has captured so many people’s attention? What about it portrays the corruption of childhood fears?
SIx and Mono
First, a small introduction to the pint sized protagonists of each game.
In the first Little Nightmares installment, we follow a small girl in a yellow raincoat who we come to know as Six, we do not know where she comes from or what led her to where she has ended up. She is alone, with only a flashlight to guide her.
(Photo retrieved from Gamersyde)
In Little Nightmares 2, we begin following another child, a boy named Mono with a paper bag on his head. We meet Mono waking up in the middle of a forest next to a glitching TV, he is alone but, unlike Six, he quickly finds company in the form of a small girl. We eventually find out that this is Six, before the raincoat and before the events of the first installment of Little Nightmares. Both Six and Mono are Silent protagonists, leaving you, the player, even further in the dark about what exactly is going on in this odd dimension.
(Photo retrieved from Collider)
The Nowhere
Little Nightmares takes place in this dreamlike realm called the Nowhere, a bizarre and oversized plane of existence. The main games so far have shown us two distinct locations in the Nowhere: the Maw (in Little Nightmares) and the Pale City (Little Nightmares 2). The two locations are both terrifying in their own ways, and they give us an immersive look into the cycles that make the Nowhere into the nightmare dimension that it is.
(Photo retrieved from Little Nightmares Wiki)
The Maw is a cramped, metal structure in the middle of the ocean. It’s a glorified hotel where these greedy, gluttonous monsters come to feed on what we can only assume to be human flesh. Six has to work her way up the structure while hiding, running, and fighting her way through the staff, and facing the cannibalistic guests before finally encountering the Maw’s mysterious owner, the Lady. A unique horror the Maw presents is isolation. You are stuck in the middle of the ocean in this impossibly massive structure with these monstrous adults whose intentions range from keeping you imprisoned to eating you alive. You are alone for the most part, apart from these small gnomes that wander the ship and other imprisoned children, but they can’t help you, and you won’t help them.
(Photo retrieved from Little Nightmares Wiki)
The Pale City, on the other hand, is far from isolated. This massive city you end up wandering is dark and wet. The buildings seem impossibly higher than they should be and there’s a distinct feeling that you’re being observed at every turn. The Pale City contains a few different locations: the Wilderness, the School, the Hospital, the Pale City, and the Transmission Tower. Each location increases the danger your character is in. The adults are not the only threat; other kids, “the Bullies,” prowl the school and might kill you if you’re not careful. The Pale City is controlled by the Signal Tower, a mysterious presence that’s the source of the constant feeling of being watched. The tower controls the citizens through the TVs, and the citizens, already brainwashed, turn violent if you interrupt their programming.
The scenario I proposed in the beginning is really a big part of why Little Nightmares’ bizarre brand of horror works so well. You exist in this game at complete odds with the landscape. The characters you play as in each game are both small malnourished children forced to survive in this tall twisted world full of cannibalistic monsters.
Little Nightmares plays with the terrifying parts of childhood. It drops you into this bizarre world with no knowledge and no real sense of control over anything. This world is not built for you and you must learn to navigate it regardless. You must maneuver through the sheer vastness of the Pale City, rooms in the Maw where you can’t even see the ceiling, and labyrinthian vent systems that lead into cavernous rooms. The enormity of the Nowhere is exaggerated to a point where you wonder who it’s really built for.
Until you see the adults of this world.
The Adults
The adults of this world are disturbing creatures, to the point where you might even wonder if they’re the same species as the children. They’re gigantic and predator-like, more than double the size of the miniscule protagonists. The most powerful of them are able to do things that shouldn’t be possible, adapting themselves to their niches in this nightmare realm.
(Photo retrieved from pcmrace)
Many types of adults exist in this world, each molded to the part of the world they inhabit and each one sporting a grotesque mask or some sort of alteration/deformity. A good example of the threat of the adults is in the hospital portion of the game. Before getting this far into the story, you may have noticed that the Bullies in the previous portion (the School) all wear these porcelain heads. You get somewhat of an explanation for this once you reach the Hospital. Here, you come across these adult sized porcelain mannequins that come alive the moment you turn off the lights. These mannequins are the patients (or rather, experiments) of the doctor you eventually meet.
The Doctor crawls along the ceiling like some decaying caterpillar with his body sagging in an odd way due to gravity. He is the brain behind these living mannequins and, presumably, behind the masks that most of the characters wear and the porcelain heads the Bullies sport. The mannequins used to be regular people until the Doctor Frankensteined together their parts with porcelain to create these poor, brainless, homunculus-like creatures. Much like the intentions behind all the other bosses, it is unclear what the Doctor is trying to do with these experiments. However, he’s very protective over them; they are the only things that seem to bring him joy. He is just one of the many threatening forces in the games, and far from the most dangerous.
(Photo retrieved from Little Nightmares Wiki)
The games, however, focus on two main adult figures you face off against: the Lady and the Thin Man. These figures serve as sort of domain guardians. They are a symbol of the cycles that Nowhere perpetuates, and they seem to show how escaping this place is futile.
(Photo retrieved from Little Nightmares Wiki)
The Thin Man is a powerful entity that has supernatural abilities to bend time and space. He resides in and seems to control the Signal Tower and the TVs that manipulate the citizens. That is until you realize the Signal Tower is a fleshy, living creature that feeds on the bodies of the hypnotized adults. Mono faces off with the Thin Man and, even after defeating him, the Signal Tower still continues to consume the world around it. Making it seem like he is not, and has never been, in control of the tower.
The Lady is another beast entirely. She’s the owner of the Maw. There’s a big theme of consumption, both figurative and literal, in this world. The guests aboard the Maw visit to eat meat and it can be inferred that they themselves eventually become the meat that makes the Maw’s cycle continue. The Lady allows this cycle to keep going because to her the Maw is a space of order in a world of chaos. But she’s not truly in control of the Maw either.
(Photo retrieved from Little Nightmares Wiki)
I keep mentioning the cycles of the Nowhere and how the adults seem to keep them running. The game never tells you this explicitly, but what I and many others have come to observe is that the Nowhere is a place that seems to run on violence; violence that exists in cycles that continue into eternity.
Growing up
(Photo retrieved from Cricket’s Cosplay)
Following the theme of cycles, we must acknowledge who our kid protagonists become at the end of their respective games. Mono and Six go through arcs during their games that end with them entering the cycles of violence. This is done subconsciously, but not unwillingly. Mono goes deeper and deeper into the Pale City, despite knowing the risks, and drags Six along with him, putting her in harm’s way. He defeats the Thin Man only to then become him after Six betrays him.
Once Six is left alone, she goes willingly into the Maw. We don’t know what her intentions were; maybe she herself didn’t know, just as Mono didn’t know what awaited him in the Pale City. Maybe all she knew was that she was hungry, and the only place in which her hunger could be satisfied was the Maw. And finally, in the end, she consumes the Lady and takes her powers for herself. We don’t know if, like Mono, Six becomes the Lady’s successor, but this wouldn’t be a stretch to assume.
In the end of their stories, Six and Mono pass from being children who are victims of the cycle of violence into becoming the perpetrators. They never escape the vicious cycles of the Nowhere. And in the end, we are left to ask, could they have escaped the nightmare?