
The Stuff of Nightmares: Little Nightmares II Review (via PS Plus)
Want to find out why this game was one of my nominations for Game Of The Year? Read on and find out why this weird and wonderfully disturbing game is just so damn good!











Main Review (by James)
When we were looking for suitably spooky games for our Halloween special last year Little Nightmares II was a game that looked interesting, especially as it had just appeared on PS Plus so I didn’t have to fork out any (extra) money for the pleasure!
Impressively I managed to make the game last all the way through to January so I can now finally give me thoughts on how I got on with it…
In short, it’s an awesome game and one of my favourites that I played in 2024. But let’s start at the beginning and see where it takes us. First off, as you can probably guess from the title, this game is the sequel to the also excellent Little Nightmares. Similar to the first game you play the part of a young child, and your job is to guide them through a dark, mysterious and generally disturbing urban landscape.
You start off alone, but during the game you do meet up with another character and explore most things together, which does make you feel a little less lonely in this gloomy world. You need to successfully escape each area / room by either solving puzzles, running away from things or parkouring to a suitable escape portal (generally a window, door or hatch).
Some of the puzzles can be pretty simple, but others can also be a bit of a challenge that require a lot of lateral thinking and a fair chunk of patience. Fortunately if your character ‘dies” they quickly respawn pretty close to where you went wrong, so you never feel like you’re repeating the same areas over and over again like in some games. Another bonus is that none of the puzzles feel ridiculous so you can solve everything using the items available once you put your mind to them.
For example, in one section in the Hospital, you have a door with a button you need to push to open it, but you’re too short to reach it, even when jumping. This one took me a little while to figure out, but in the end I realised that if I climbed up the cabinets and onto the shelf I could then knock off the glass jar which contained a preserved brain. Once the glass jar smashed on the floor I could pick up the brain and chuck it at the button so that then door would open. So for that puzzle I literally had to use my brain to solve it. Genius!
The overall setting in each of the sections is dark, mysterious and more than a little disturbing. It’s one of those games where you’re not sure who you are, where you’re going or why you’re going there but along the way you meet a whole host of weird characters and see a whole host of weird things happening!
One of those weird characters comes in the School section where you’ll encounter a whole load of school children with clay heads that you have to smash with a hammer and then a teacher with an almost indefinitely-extending neck that can chase you through corridors and vents! She’s pretty terrifying…
So you have the disturbing settings and the scary characters and the generally sketchy vibe, and you then also have a running theme of a society in some form of massive decay where things have gone horribly wrong. Everything feels broken and dirty and abondoned, with the occasional glimpse of humans jumping off buildings, or staring hypnotically at fuzzy TV screens, or just being really wretched and angry. There really isn’t a single endearing character in the whole game – even the two protagonists are deeply disturbed and lost in the world, leading to a pretty depressing ending.
You don’t come away from this game smiling or with a massive sense of achievement. You don’t really ‘enjoy’ playing the game at all. But there’s something about it that keeps you fully immersed in the world from the first miserable scene to the last miserable second! It really is so well done and such a special game to play.
Just don’t expect to go to bed after completing it without experiencing your own little nightmare or two…

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