Little Nightmares

Little Nightmares is a puzzle-platformer horror adventure game developed by Swedish independent Tarsier Studios and published on the PC and several other platforms by Bandai Namco Entertainment in the spring of 2017. The game follows the adventure of little hungry girl Six who must explore the Maw, a mysterious world full of monsters born straight from our nightmares.

By smartly combining eye-catching graphics, audio design, strong dark atmosphere, and intuitive gameplay design, Little Nightmares quickly garnered praise from worldwide media and players, making it one of the most popular indie game releases of the late 2010s. This praise helped it to be sold in more than 2 million copies after a few years on the market.

The gameplay of Little Nightmares is focused on a 2.5D world, meaning it is rendered in full 3D but the player can only move in predefined directions, thus greatly simplifying the exploration and offering a clear way of approaching stealth, combat, and numerous puzzle encounters. Because our lead little girl has very limited move sets and is generally helpless in many situations, players have to use their widths, tactical thinking, and puzzle-solving to pass many horror encounters with twisted monsters from this dark world of The Maw.

While the girl usually has to sneak or puzzle her way out of many dangerous situations, the game also very rarely gives her the tools to actively oppose monsters around her, giving players very satisfying sequences of fighting back and equaling the playing field.

Shortly after the release of the base game, developers from Tarsier Studios have also released several DLC packs that aim to showcase the events from the Six’s adventure and the world of the Maw told from other perspectives. Those packs were The Depths (June 2017), the Hideaway (November 2017), and The Residence (February 2018). In addition to these DLC packs, the game was also expanded with a mobile app “Very Little Nightmares” in 2019, a comic book, and a full prequel game Little Nightmares 2 in 2021 received even more praise than the original.

Little Nightmares can today be enjoyed on a wide variety of desktop and laptop PCs. The game is fully optimized for modern 64-bit versions of Windows OS (Win 7 and newer) and is translated into 13 international languages.