Game Thoughts: Little Nightmares
After playing through Little Nightmares II, I decided to grab the first game while it was on sale in the Nintendo eShop. Little Nightmares is a shorter, simpler experience with a heavier focus on puzzles, so I was able to play through the entire main story in a single night.
Unfortunately, the first game is also significantly more fatphobic than its prequel, which definitely dampened my overall enjoyment.
Little Nightmares II features an array of monsters with different appearances who are terrifying because the player never knows exactly what to expect. Little Nightmares, on the other hand, features basically the same villain over and over again: Creatures in ill-fitting and obviously fat human skin suits, moving slowly and grunting their way through tasks like cooking and doing dishes. They are constantly hungry and objectively gross, reaching under their skin suits to scratch or licking their fingers as they butcher raw slabs of meat.
In the final chapters, the player has to navigate a buffet reminiscent of Spirited Away, where multiple fat creatures gorge themselves on tons of food. Meanwhile, the main villain is a waif-like woman with soul-sucking powers.
Throughout Little Nightmares, the protagonist, Six, becomes increasingly monstrous — a journey that starts in Little Nightmares II and could seemingly continue into a third game. She has to eat to survive at five points in-game, and she goes from taking meat offered to her by another child to throwing aside a sausage to eat the creature that presents it to her. In the end, she eats the main villain and absorbs her powers, then walks back through the buffet seemingly sucking the souls from all of the fat people who are still eating (and still trying to grab her for an additional tasty snack).
Whether or not it’s intentional, the message seems to be that being fat makes you evil, and you can only be defeated by the power of thinness.
Little Nightmares was released in 2017, so I’m late in talking about this. Others have addressed the fatphobia in-game before, including Gentle Gamers. That said, my search for “Little Nightmares fatphobia” only turns up a few results, so it felt pertinent to add at least one more post for people who may want to play the game, but don’t want to see this imagery.
As noted above, Little Nightmares II does not imply that being fat inherently makes you an evil villain who eats small children. I don’t know if developer Tarsier Studios changed up the game’s villain types in response to fatphobic criticisms, but I do hope these comments at least reached someone on the team.
The Little Nightmares games are fun. They’re stressful and terrifying (especially the second one), and the puzzles are difficult without being impossible. Moving through this world can be frustrating, especially when save/spawn points are few and far between, but overall, I really enjoyed playing through the main stories in both titles. I am also fascinated by Six’s journey and how Little Nightmares explores monstering, so if there’s a third game, I’ll play that one, too.
I’m grateful I played the second game first, if only because playing them in release order likely would have turned me off of the series completely. I hate that I have to critique such rampant fatphobia in something I otherwise love, especially because it happens so often.
If this imagery is upsetting or triggering, but you are still interested in the Little Nightmares story, I encourage you to read a game summary or peek at playthrough footage to determine whether you feel safe playing yourself.
Little Nightmares II is developed by Tarsier Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It is currently available on PlayStation 4, Stadia, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC (via Steam).
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