They say that the function of a critic is to tell part of his own experience; What does not usually say much is that that experience is always preceded and often conditioned by other experiences. The most recent events that has happened in the field of culture, before it finally hands over to Little Nightmares, is a tremendously intense and obsessive reading that I’m doing It (that), the novel by Stephen King at the end of next summer will receive a second film adaptation and to which I return almost twenty years after my first time alone with her. I have more than half of the volume, which is a tome of 1,100 pages one after another, but the boot is still a dagger that I failed to get me out of the stomach during the rest of the story, a moment too fierce terror as to get out me of the head. On the last day of his life, just before being literally torn apart by the clown Pennywise, Georgie Denbrough stroll their scarce six years old the Street outside his home, running around in the rain with a paper boat that sails playful towards the mouth of most terrifying sewer in the history of cinema and literature. Georgie wears a yellow raincoat, the same garment made rags with which a neighbor find it mutilated and bleeding a few seconds after the last deadly blast.
The girl who stars in Little Nightmares also wears a yellow raincoat, also runs around with that gawky fragility of children and also is eaten, in all likelihood, in the first minutes of departure. My brain he weaves only that connection immediately, just where late the persistent clot that is my memory of Georgie and her murder, and rearrange me in my seat. I give my bottle of water a long drink, upload me the eyeglass frame, and press start, notice that I am holding in command with more force than usual. This is start conditioning, me cago in the sea.
Creatures that reside in these dark galleries have, in fact, appearance of puppet. But not that hanging by threads or cover a hand, but which carry an adult inside that is responsible for walking and operate the mysterious mechanisms of their gestures. We can almost feel the weight of the monsters, balancing device on each journey while they carry out their chores. That quality of the alien also emphasizes the discomfort: those bugs are in your kitchen, salted fish, fillets, and crush or in your store or your library, toys and other belongings that have probably come from the same place as the sea of shoes that we crossed shortly after you start the game. It is a home, but a stranger home. And if Sartre says that hell is other, home to another must be, by extension, something infernal.
The routine of the monsters only interrupted when we spotted and then entering a frightening frenzy that leads them to pursue us between accelerated snorts and a growl of predators hungry after a tasty animal. Hanging meat prepared in unimaginable ways, his impossibly long arms felt like tentacles places that seemed to not be able to reach their twisted mouths become even more deformed between gurgling and cloth eyes sweep the environment in our search. They are not our only enemies in the game, but are that the pace-setters of our journey and give sense to the scenario that occupy.
Basic stealth which hand we take to go unnoticed among the giant comeninos, and also the design of the majority of puzzles that requires us to move several times through dangerous areas to take parts from one place to another, make Little Nightmares a concentrated experience, a sticky density that permeates throughout the game. Not only is that its different facets are intermixed in the same sections (in a few metres may be stealth, puzzles and persecution, as if the game would have proposed use of each space to the maximum), but which also own objects which interact, the furniture and the monsters, have an especially robust quality. It is hard to describe, but it looks a lot like the difference that one sees in a film to distinguish between digital effects and physical effects, latex, foam and fake blood.
As well as their creative cousins of Playdead, Tarsier Studios people has not used the script as a wrapper to their puzzles, but upside down: Little Nightmares seeks, first of all, tell us a story, a tale dark to frighten children to the principle that, as the game progresses begins to evolve into a fable of strong political flashes in remote tune with tales such as Watership Down or animal farm. And at the same time, in an expressive effort, game shuns all explanation of all plot premise, any hint of catch us hand to take us somewhere. A single text beyond mild mechanical indications in the first puzzle, a dialogue or a Word. The vehemence with which the game relies on an essential child terror as the abandonment (someone suggested to me in advance some influence of the city of lost children, and nailed squarely) takes you to suggest some conception of the orphan from the player himself, completely helpless to what lies ahead.
Little Nightmares cries be judged by its history and by its way of telling it, and in that sense his energetic final movement seems to seek a roundness that is close to the end of Inside which unfortunately fails to match. The general idea is understood left fringes that not just the necessary sharpness to the symbolism of its conclusion but in this sense becomes more difficult to continue thinking more on it by what it implies for its visual display. But those three and a half hours circumvent babeantes jaws and fingers Arachnids inspired by the Tim Burton more ominous, Jean-Pierre Jeunet darker and the most grotesque Jim Henson – dampened also, perhaps, by the influence of Maurice Sendak and the Brothers Grimm – are, no doubt, a fantastically soft and absorbent, following a fragile paper boat in the Creek next to the sidewalk on your street , toward the mouth of black and stinking sewer in whose dark, whatever happens, never, never, never should look. [9]
