by Lena Kinder
Do you ever get spooked out by something familiar? You see it—whatever it is—and think to yourself: “That’s some freaky shit.” Well, here’s a little bit of news for you—that feeling probably comes from the uncanny. But you don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve got a good ol’ dead white guy to back me up. In his essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud gives an in-depth explanation and definition on what-in-the-heck “uncanny” means: “It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfills this condition” (Freud 15). Now that we’ve got our handy-dandy definition, the real question is how does the uncanny tie into video games? It’s no surprise to gamers——and, if we are being honest, especially non-gamers——that video games can twist the familiar in uncomfortable ways. Look at Five Nights at Freddy’s and ask yourself why these games are so scary. An easy answer would, of course, be the jump scares, but if we dig a little deeper the initial fear comes from those animatronics coming to life. The murderous intent of this mechanical bot-band even comes second-hand to the fact that they are alive. Still, Five Nights at Freddy’s doesn’t cap the uncanny in the gaming industry; there are many more such as the F.E.A.R trilogy with their killer little girl, Alma; the Resident Evil series with the undead (among other things); and——if we really want to push the boundaries here——the Kingdom Hearts series with Sora’s giant feet.
So, now that we’ve got a decent idea of the uncanny and how it plays its part in games, it’s time to jump into our central game Little Nightmares. Developed by Tarsier Studios and published by Bandai Namco, Little Nightmares was released in April 2017 and shared a similar tone with other horror platformers such as LIMBO (2010) and INSIDE (2016). Like LIMBO and INSIDE, Little Nightmares throws the players into an unfamiliar world with no context. The world of Little Nightmares is——frankly——disturbing. With every open door, players are forced to uncover the secrets of this uncanny world for themselves——all while facing grotesque enemies and environments. As we work our way through this analysis of Little Nightmares, we will take a closer look at its disturbing fictional world, distorted sounds and graphics, grotesque characters and settings, and darkness——allowing a fresh focus on stealth——to give players a truly horrifying experience.
Fictional World
Players explore a dark and disturbing world in Little Nightmares, which evokes deep fears with every new area discovered and enemy found. The game allows players to participate in a fictional world that is both familiar and unfamiliar. The fictional world of Little Nightmares showcases the uncanny effect with the use of grotesque elements. In The Fantastic in Art and Fiction, the grotesque in “The World Upside-Down” is described in a way that mirrors that of Little Nightmares:
With its insistence on ironic reversals, on fluent and fertile opposites, the grotesque also resembles the topos of The World Upside-Down, that topsy-turvy universe where things are no longer in their place, where order is disrupted, where hierarchies tumble, and the Fool is king. Both the Grotesque and The World Upside-Down possess a darkly comic portent, that the fantastic uncovers and explores; both serve the key function of revealing the constructed nature of rationality, of the mandate that everything be in its place (1).
The fictional world of Little Nightmares is much like “The World Upside-Down” because they both use ironic reversals and dark portents to show participants a world both familiar and unfamiliar. Not only that, but this game holds mystery within it, allowing players to uncover their own theories about the world they are experiencing. As Juul Jesper writes,
Games project fictional worlds through a variety of different means, but the fictional worlds are imagined by the player, and the player fills in any gaps in the fictional world. Many games also present fictional worlds that are optional for the player to imagine, and some present worlds that are contradictory and incoherent (Jesper 1).
Little Nightmares gives the fictional world ambiguity so that players can envision their own nightmares and project them onto the game.
Distorted Sounds and Graphics
Unlike many——well, most——video games, there is little music in Little Nightmares. Although music is used, it is only during short moments in which players witness their character, Six, undergo an attempt to repress a morbid behavior and dark transformation. The majority of sounds emerge from enemies that Six encounters at different stages within the game. These enemies create disturbing sounds such as deep gargling, bone cracking, and high pitch screeching that erupt feelings of anxiety and fear within players. While one may find this to be disturbing another sound that becomes twisted is the sound of a heartbeat. As enemies come closer to Six’s location the sound of a heartbeat will become increasingly quicker and louder. With every pounding heartbeat, the player experiences increased feelings of anxiety. These encounters cause a comforting and familiar sound, a heartbeat, to become twisted and unfamiliar.
Players experience a world that exists on a distorted scale. The environment and enemies are unnaturally large in comparison to Six. As explained by Bandai Namco in their overview of the game: “Explore a disturbingly charming dollhouse, a place that is both prison and playground. Peek into Six’s world, part dream, part nightmare, where every step feels like a leap, and every shadow a vast darkness!” (1). This description calls back to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when Alice eats a cake that shrinks her. She, like Six, must navigate a world that towers over her. Throughout the levels of Little Nightmares, players must navigate the game's environments by climbing bookshelves and cages, hiding underneath beds and tables, and even crawling through air ducts and underneath floors to maneuver through this fictional world. The graphics within this game are not only immense but also dark. The colors used in Little Nightmares are duller than Six, who is wearing a bright yellow raincoat. This causes players to have a sense of discomfort and question if Six belongs in this uncanny world. The game, much like the video game INSIDE, uses graphics to create a fog (fig 1) in the background turning-up that eerie atmosphere as well as furthering the settings depth——and heightening the fears of what lies within the fog.
Image still of Little Nightmares with Six standing on a platform with a candle
Fig 1
Disturbing Characters
The characters in Little Nightmares embody the uncanny through their grotesque appearance and behavior. As mentioned before the graphics in Little Nightmares are of a much larger scale than that of the playable character. In Consuming the Grotesque Body, a research paper examining the grotesque, Christina Goulding, Michael Saren, and John Follett write:
The fusion of organic and inorganic parts, the distortion of natural forms, and the exaggeration of fundamental aspects of life such as birth, sex, death, scatological processes, aging, size and gender, not only surprise and baffle us, they call forth a mixture of feelings, often contradictory, of fear, dread and repulsion, of fascination, amusement and derision, that provides us with an insight into the darker side of human nature, (Goulding, Saren, and Follett 115).
When Six enters a bedroom full of sleeping children, this is when players first encounter “The Janitor” (fig 2). The Janitor is an enemy that has an irregular humanoid body. The length The Janitor’s arms are unsettling to say the least. They reach out far enough to touch the tops of bookshelves, creep beneath doorways, and pull Six from air ducts. The Janitor, as well as other enemies in the game, appears to be wearing human skin. The Janitor’s eyes are covered by a layer of skin, which peels down from his scalp. This is a distortion of the natural form and causes players to feel both repulsed and curious about what lies beneath the skin. The uncanny appearance of the Janitor is not this enemy’s only disgusting characteristic. This enemy creates morbid sounds such as bones cracking and heavy breathing, instilling dread within players.
Image of The Janitor reaching for Six with his overlong arms
Fig 2
Twisted Settings
The setting in Little Nightmares twists innocent and mundane areas into dark and fearsome places. While the player explores the world, they will consistently pass metal doors, which appear to be prison cells. At first, these doors seem to be used to execute an eerie atmosphere, however, the player comes across one of these prison cells (fig 3) with an ajar door. Inside the room, there is a twin-sized bed, that is of similar scale to Six, drawings colored in what appears to be crayons and black ink, and small handprints covering the walls. Discovering this room creates unease within the player as they begin piecing together the inner workings of this world.
Six investigating a dark bedroom with black handprints and drawings on the wall
Fig 3
As the player continues to travel through different areas in the game, they end up entering The Kitchen. It is important to mention that while the player works their way towards The Kitchen, they first walk across small bodies that are wrapped in cloth and rope and stored in giant metal containers. The paper used to wrap these bodies seems to be the very kind used to swaddled meat in a butcher’s shop. If that’s not eerie enough, blood is smeared across the tiled floor leading to The Kitchen, making it clear to the players that beef is not on the menu tonight. The Kitchen twists the process of cooking into something taboo and disgusting. Players watch as “The Cooks,” another grotesque enemy, waddles through The Kitchen coughing and whipping its face before handling uncooked child-meat. Plates are towering high enough to reach the ceiling (fig 4), creating a sense of unevenness, morphing this disturbing scene into one that is almost comical.
Six in The Kitchen avoiding the grotesque cooks
Fig 4
Darkness
Oftentimes, when one envisions the uncanny, darkness is one of the first thoughts to pop into their minds. We can turn back to our friend Freud and his essay “The Uncanny” to get a better understanding of darknesses role in the uncanny: “Concerning the factors of silence, solitude, and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free” (Freud 20). Darkness plays an essential role in the experience Little Nightmares offers players. Players use darkness to hide in the shadows, which intensifies the involvement of stealth. A particularly intense moment lies within this game's downloadable content (DLC) The Residence. During the DLC, players become a boy, Seven, and work through his story which coincides with Six’s journey. When players encounter The Janitor for the first time in this DLC, it is inside of a room that is completely engulfed in darkness. Players must use Seven’s flashlight to journey ahead, but the light only travels a short distance (fig 5). Once players delve deeper into the depths of this dark room, they discover The Janitor. The uncanny is revealed through childhood fear; a monster is hiding within the darkness. The player must throw a battery near the enemy and quickly hide before being captured. Once the player has accomplished this, they must sneak quietly past The Janitor. However, it is not a simple feat. The rooms have coal laying across the floor in places that may seem easy to maneuver around the enemy. The coals create a small sound when Seven steps and them, and this automatically alerts The Janitor. Thus players must use stealth and overcome their fear, often coming in near contact with the enemy in order to make an escape.
Seven trying to sneak past The Janitor in the dark with a dim flashlight
Fig 5
Conclusion
By this point, it should be pretty obvious that Little Nightmares is the queen—all hail Six—of the world of uncanny video games. Little Nightmares shows how video games can give participants powerful experiences, forcing us to have the creatures that go bump in the night. In Andrew Bennets and Nicholas Royle’s An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, they describe how the uncanny can affect those who experience it: “In sum, then, the uncanny can be described as the thoughts and feelings that may arise on those occasions when the homely becomes unhomely, when the familiar becomes uncomfortably strange or the unfamiliar becomes strangely familiar,” (40). Little Nightmares breaks into the deepest fears of its players, leading them into a strange fictional world, peeking their ears towards the slightest sounds, and lifting their eyes towards monsters with an appetite for children.
Works Cited
Bennett Andrew & Royle Nicholas. “An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory Fourth Edition,” New York: Routledge, 2014.
Christina Goulding, Michael Saren, and John Follett. (2003), " Consuming the Grotesque Body," in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 6, eds. Darach Turley and Stephen Brown, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 115-119. http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/11728/volumes/e06/E-06.
“The Fantastic in Art & Fiction,” Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, © 2000-2012, Cornell University. All Rights Reserved. http://fantastic.library.cornell.edu/grotesque.php.
Jesper, Juul. “Fiction,” Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2011).
LITTLE NIGHTMARES, © 2010 - 2019 BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Europe S.A.S. https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/little-nightmares/little-nightmares.
SIGMUND FREUD. “The “Uncanny” (1919),” http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf.