Little Nightmares Preview 2. Nightmares on a Balloon

Little Nightmares  was released in 2017 and quickly gained popular love, and along with 2 million copies sold on all platforms. The success of the game stunned the authors so much that, to the sound of fanfare, they turned a self-contained story about a girl in a yellow raincoat into a full-fledged series like HuniePop 2. Despite the two in the title,  Little Nightmares 2  is the third game in the series, which takes place after the events of  Little Nightmares  and  Very Little Nightmares .

A new main character awaits us in the sequel. This is the boy Mono, a specialist in survival in a creepy world where televisions have somehow destroyed many living things, leaving only freaks, mutants and their slaves in the empty cities. A devilish TV show that someone is broadcasting from a distant tower has ruined the usual course of things, and only Mono can get to the tower to stop this chaos. In theory, of course. His assistant and guide will be the Sixth – the same girl in a yellow raincoat who, with the help of a miracle and gamer ingenuity, survived the events of the previous parts. This time she is assigned the role of an NPC controlled by the AI, making it easier for us to pass. You see, without a second pair of hands, Mono will not be able to escape even from the first boss.

Judging by the information available, there will be only five locations in the final version – two of them are just presented in the press version of Little Nightmares 2 . Players are allowed to go through the “Forest” location, the only inhabitant of which is the Hunter – a maniac that chases random victims lost in the forest. This zone was repeatedly shown during most of the presentations, it is available in the demo on PC , Xbox One and PlayStation 4 , there are plenty of walkthroughs on YouTube … And in this sense, the experience from the starting section of the game turned out to be pale, because the authors from Tarsier Studios have repeatedly all this to us demonstrated.

The location is traversed in twenty minutes: we get to the house hidden in the forest, save the assistant, run into the boss and run away from him until we get an opportunity to get even. Fortunately, after defeating the Hunter, the story does not end – gamers get access to the “School”, in which the game begins to really unfold both in terms of gameplay and plot. The school is commanded by an evil Teacher, she is the head teacher, class teacher and just a frostbitten headmistress, who experiments on human organs and brings ceramic pupils to life. These students of the school are distinguished by bloodthirstiness, violent disposition and an almost complete lack of intelligence.

At school, Mono and Six are separated, and surviving alone in Little Nightmares 2 is much more difficult. As if confirming this, in contrast to the platform riddles of the “forest”, in the second location the game turns into an attraction, where Mono will have to alternate sneak runs under the headmistress’s nose with daring forays along the corridors and locker rooms, fighting with psycho dolls literally on their fists. The cruelty, absurdity of the local world and inhuman experiments – everything will be shown here in close-up.

As an enemy, the Teacher is much more dangerous than the Hunter, so the blood in his temples pulsates furiously, like a gamepad where we play Shadow Blade 5e, whose vibrations imitate the heartbeat in moments of stress, when Mono is about to be found, exposed and punished. By the second half, the press version of LN2 is revealed, demonstrating the rich potential of the game, which at first glance seemed like a banal horror, but in fact it is much more complicated and deeper – conspiracy theories about the devilry happening here are already available on YouTube .

At some point, the adventure ends on a suspended note with the remark “Thanks for playing!” But ahead of the players are waiting for a city, a hospital and a tower, judging by the trailers, which retained an eerie atmosphere and freak antagonists, such as the mysterious Skinny Man or dummies that freeze in the light of a hand lamp. Putting the gamepad aside, you realize that the adventure has drawn you tightly, while no one has answered a single question about Mono’s mysterious abilities or the destructive effect of a TV show. Well, how is that?

Little Nightmares 2 is  already a good example of fixing the bugs of the first part, and it seems that F95Zone Studios has fixed everything except the unresponsive and not too intuitive controls. It just raises the main criticism – the character often “forgets” to cling to the desired edges, which results in falling into the abyss. Sometimes the game is too scrupulous about the accuracy of jumping to objects hanging in the air – jumping a centimeter to the left or to the right of the point conceived by the authors, you fall past the necessary rope and lose progress in moving along the location. Good luck getting to the ceiling jar with brains.

Most of all, the pedantic precision that developers expect from the player is annoying in combat scenes against multiple opponents – for any blow, you need to surgically place the character accurately facing the running enemy in order to deliver a slow blow, the only trick in Mono’s arsenal. Needless to say, a lack of accuracy again leads to instant death? Reason understands how to win, but the lack of aiming assistance in jumps and strikes makes you replay the same scenes over and over again. And this is annoying.