The Themes and Imagery of Little Nightmares

I somehow failed to notice that Little Nightmares II, a game I’ve been quite looking forward to, is releasing tomorrow. After realizing this, I decided to slap out a quick blog about some issues I had with the themes and imagery of the first game, which is something I’ve been meaning to write about but hadn’t gotten around to yet.

Little Nightmares is a horror puzzle-platformer in the style of Limbo or Inside, and if you like those kinds of games then you’ll probably like it as well. I enjoyed my time with it several years ago (get the complete edition, some of the DLC is better than the main game), but I was bothered by the vague and muddled way the game handles its themes, and the way it used some loaded imagery for apparently no reason.

(Spoilers from here on out)

Like Limbo and Inside, the game has a highly ambiguous story and drops the player into a surreal world with little explanation of what’s happening or why. You play as Six, a girl in a yellow raincoat who is either very small or in a world inhabited by very large people, or both. As the game starts you find yourself deep within the bowels of The Maw, a sinister ship/submarine thing that appears to sail around to various ports, luring in the nightmarish Wallace And Gromit people who live there with an endless supply of delicious food. This seems to be aimed at fattening them up so that the Maw’s ruler, some sort of vampiric being, can drain their souls or life essence or something in order to sustain herself.

All of this is pretty firmly established visually, but things get trickier when it comes to some of the images the game uses to tell this story, and the themes those images imply...or, more to the point, fail to imply, or maybe imply without the developers realizing that was what they were implying.

There’s this whole running idea of hunger and eating, which is by far the game’s most consistent element. The people lured (or maybe called--it’s not clear if they’re going entirely willingingly or if they’ve been brainwashed in some way) to the Maw appear to be gripped by an insatiable urge to devour anything they can get their hands on, including Six. Over the course of the game Six herself becomes hungrier and hungrier, until she eventually eats one of the little gnome things that are implied (and then in the DLC straight-up confirmed) to be other children. 

After defeating the Maw’s ruler, who based on various hints and clues might be her own mother, Six gains her soul-stealing powers and the game ends with Six exiting the Maw while draining the life out of a bunch of the ship’s “guests”. The scene is to an extent empowering and cathartic--we’ve spent the whole game running and hiding from anything larger than ourselves and now we get to merc a bunch of them--but it’s also undeniably framed as sinister, with Six having undergone a loss of innocence. She’s gained this terrible power and is going out into the world, still presumably in thrall to a hunger that can only be satisfied by killing other sentient beings.

So, okay, fine. But let's talk about some of the imagery used to convey these story beats.

The game always frames eating as grotesque or sinister, or both. The Maw’s guests stuff themselves like zombies, eating seemingly as a mindless compulsion until they’ve transformed into gross, misshapen caricatures. The only time Six eats anything in the game, it’s a cute creature that had up until this point seemed to view her as a friend and ally. Contrasted with the people lured into the Maw, the ship’s owner seems thin and beautiful...until we discover that she consumes the life essence of others to survive, at which point the mask literally comes off and it’s implied she has a scary monster-face underneath. 

None of this is subtle, and it’s so not subtle that it risks crossing over into mean-spirited and kind of troubling territory. You could look at a lot of the imagery around the Maw’s guests and conclude that the developers were pushing a crude fat-shaming narrative, moralising about how eating too much, or eating the wrong things, makes you at best fat and ugly, which are bad things to be, or at worst no longer human. 

But the thing is, I’m not really comfortable lobbing that criticism at the game, because I’m not convinced that’s what the developers were really trying to say. In fact, I’m not sure they knew what they were trying to say, assuming they were trying to say anything at all.

Is that actually a problem? Does all media have to be “about” something? Well, it kind of does when your story has a highly ambiguous story, because the audience will naturally engage with material on a metaphorical or thematic level in the absence of a surface-level narrative. But it’s also important to retain control of your thematic underpinnings when you’re employing highly charged and emotional imagery, such as when you deliberately invoke the Holocaust.

Early on in the game, Six finds herself walking on top of a huge pile of old-fashioned shoes, which we can assume belong to the many people who’ve been consumed within the Maw. The image of piles of discarded shoes (and luggage, which we also see) is so heavily tied to the Holocaust that there’s simply no other way to interpret it. The developers can’t have failed to realize that this is what they were doing; it must have been deliberate.

So is that what the game is about? Is it a metaphor for the Holocaust? That seems like it could be the case during the game’s first half, when you’re exploring environments that look like 1940s Europe masking an industrial killing machine. But then you get into the final third where you’re in a giant Asian restaurant and the Maw’s ruler is like a...geisha?

Why is it an Asian restaurant? Why does she look like a geisha? What does any of this mean?

I get the feeling that Little Nightmares kind of got away from its developers, that they started out going down one direction, then either couldn’t figure out where to take that or changed their minds and didn’t have the time or resources to go back and alter what they had already planned out. The last parts of the game where you’re confronting Six’s mother (if the geisha is her mother) don’t really have anything at all to do with what came before, and there’s a pretty clear break where the game seems to suddenly swerve away from the images and ideas it was employing earlier. The Asian restaurant in particular is a jarring environment that comes completely out of left field.

When the game was originally announced, Tarsier Studios stated that it was going to be about exploring childhood fears (hence the title), but that is mostly not the case in the finished product. There are remnants of the idea in the first half--the gnomes who seem to be transformed children, a brief sequence set in what appears to be an orphanage--but for the most part the concept falls by the wayside. On a narrative level it’s very hard to figure out why there are even children in the Maw or what their role in its operation is supposed to be, and thematically the idea of childhood is floating loose, completely disconnected from anything else in the game.

Of course, the game’s defenders would probably say that I’m overthinking it, that the game is simply meant to be a grab-bag of fairytale influences rolled together: a little Snow White here, a little Spirited Away there, blended together into a kind of horror version of In The Night Kitchen. 

The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, Inside is also a jumble of disparate influences and visual ideas combined into a kind of horror version of In The Night Kitchen, except it has clearly thought-out thematic throughlines and you can--and people have--spend years unpacking what all of the imagery in the game is trying to communicate.

The second problem is that as far as I can remember, none of those influences deliberately invoked the Holocaust.

So that’s my little mini-rant on Little Nightmares. Like I said at the start, I did enjoy the game despite my criticisms. According to the reviews the sequel engages more firmly with the whole “childhood fears” angle, and even the first game’s DLC felt more consistent in its story and visual design, so I’m hopeful that Tarsier has upped their game.