Backstory for these entries: I'd been traveling since mid-May, largely away from cities or technology, and hadn't seen a computer of any sort for about 6 weeks. Before coming home, I stayed in a city for a few days and found an internet cafe, where I decided to spend some time playing games. It was such a great cap to the trip, and I'll always remember playing these in an internet cafe.
Little Nightmares reminded me that I need to quit being seduced by game art styles. It looks awesome, and some of the characters and settings are indeed nightmarish. The audio complemented the visuals wonderfully and the whole game is oppressive and tense. They nailed the mood. Comparisons to Limbo and Inside are appropriate. I've read people criticizing some of the controls and the grabbing action, but I found all that worked fine. What I didn't like was that the game didn't feel coherent. Each chapter felt disparate. There's the section with the janitor, then you play the kitchen level, then you play the ship level, then you play the Japanese house level. I couldn't really figure out what these levels had in common, how they were connected. And all of a sudden, you're on this ship with Japanese decor and fat people gorging and chasing you (deeply unsettling stuff there), and then there's a geisha and it's supposed to be scary but it really wasn't because it doesn't make sense! Plenty of games don't have cohesive narratives, but they usually make up for it with amazing gameplay. This though was easy puzzles and slick presentation with little gameplay meat behind it to make up for the narrative. I wouldn't recommend playing this one.
Oh yeah, funny story. This was the first thing I played in the internet cafe. I haven't been to an internet cafe in probably 8 years. I'd played through almost two chapters of Little Nightmares when (I thought) I touched a wire with my foot and the computer shut off. The computers wipe whatever was downloaded when they shut off, and since I didn't close the game, Steam didn't synch. So I lost my progress! I went back and forth about starting over and finally decided to, but from then on, I exited whatever game I was playing about every hour. Sure enough, this was a good strategy because the computer randomly reset itself a few times (I didn't touch the wire!).
add a comment 
|
