There isn't much of a story to speak of. You play as Six, a little girl (I think) trapped in a giant ship called The Maw. The Maw seems to host some kind of event where these disfigured "people" come on board and just gorge themselves on food and you are the main course so you have to get out. The game itself however, doesn't tell you this. This information is given to you on the Steam store page of all things, I had no idea until AFTER I was finished with the game that my character was called Six and the big ship was called The Maw. There's no cutscenes or notes to read or anything, which is fine since they are clearly going for a more environmental storytelling approach, but the story isn't interesting enough so it all just comes off as a bit pretentious.
Game play wise it's just a platformer. You run, you jump, you pull blocks, push buttons and turn valves and shit to progress. Every so often the game will throw a big monster at you which you have to hide from as you go from room to room. There is no combat, you can't fend off the big bad unless you are scripted to do so which means if you are caught, most often you are going to get killed. Getting killed though doesn't matter because check points are extremely frequent which means that not only is Little Nightmares pathetically easy to finish but it also sucks all the tension out of the horror. I'm not scared of the blind creature with massive spider arms if I know that I'm only going to lose 30 seconds of progress if he gets me.
I'm trying to keep this post spoiler free but there's one game play section I just HAVE to talk about because it pissed me off so hard. There's a bit where you have to run along a table, food is haphazardly strewn everywhere and the weirdos that inhabit the ship and just guzzling it up Hungry Hungry Hippo style. You have to weave between the people as to not get grabbed but it's extremely tight and the hitboxes for what counts as a grab and what counts as a near miss just don't make any sense. The checkpoint for this section however, is right near the table, so all you get is a feeling of rage welling within you as you have to creep your way down the table for the 17th fucking time because the slow, fat, lumbering monsters suddenly have reflexes like the flash.
I will say though, visually the game is quite interesting. I remember watching the Rohl Dahl movie James and the Giant Peach as a kid and I haven't seen it since then and I'm not going to look it up before publishing this post but it was giving me those vibes. The art style is quite striking and everything looks nice and spooky. It's got this weird dollhouse vibe to it all that gives it a nice creepy vibe making me think that Little Nightmares would have served better as an animated short film rather than a game.
Little Nightmare isn't a bad game, a lot of effort went into it and it shows, it's a perfectly serviceable little platformer, I just don't understand all the hype that surrounds it. So if a short, simple little horror adventure is what you want then I'd still recommend picking it up just don't expect anything more than that. There's also a Little Nightmares 2 and I didn't hate this first one enough to not give that a try at some point so maybe some of my gripes are fixed with the sequel, we shall see
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