Otherworldly imagery, environmental storytelling, teamwork, and immense vulnerability blend to form a glorious synergy in Little Nightmares II, a game with almost no dialogue that nevertheless centers on the collaborative relationship between Mono and Six. Six, returning from the first game, is now an NPC whom the player assists and vice versa. Yes, she will eventually obtain her iconic yellow raincoat (which looks as if Georgie's was taken right out of It: Chapter One)! As Mono, the player traverses landscapes ranging from a forest to a dark hallway full of writhing puppet hands. Simple but brilliant, this trek through nightmarish environments accomplishes a lot with relatively little.
Production Values
Maybe the game looks a little clearer on a console besides the Switch, but the aesthetic and the atmosphere rooted in it come across very well even on the Switch's often underpowered hardware. Each environment reinforces the bizarrity of Mono's surroundings, with the exact appearance and threats differing. The first setting is a forest featuring a house. Here, a firearm-brandishing hunter pursues you from a home through tall grass. The second is a deteriorating school, complete with a classroom and teacher who walks from desk to desk as you sneak by and whose neck stretches out so that she can grab you with her mouth if she sees you. Next, you venture through a mannequin-maker's residence with walking, lunging puppets, then a city where the adult inhabitants are mesmerized by a TV broadcast. Eventually, you arrive at the most "dream-like" location of all for the game's finale. As dim as the lighting often is and as muted as the colors tend to be, some sequences involving blue or pinkish purple are elevated by the stark color choices.
Gameplay
In spite of the fixed side-scrolling camera angle, you can walk into the background and foreground; this is required to advance in some parts, in fact. At other times, such as a certain escape portion, the movement is limited to something much closer to mere left-right directions, but this does not represent the game as a whole. You will need to walk into the background or foreground for many puzzles and environmental actions, as well as to defend yourself from malevolent, animated dolls in the second phase of the game. Trial and error might be necessary to identify the correct or easiest way to progress. It can be hard to time weapon swings properly when doll enemies get close and then wait to spring upon you, for instance. But, there is always some sort of visual clue as to what to do or where to go.
Early on, you pull a stick out of an activated bear trap to use it to trigger another bear trap in front of the way forward. Shortly after, tossing objects into a bed of leaves to reveal the positions of many more bear traps as they leap out and close one after another. The game has already provided the hint, and then it is up to the player to utilize the mechanic in a different spot. Sometimes the necessary action is not revealed in instructions with onscreen text, but by situational cues. There is a part where you must use a crank and sliding an item across the floor while the teacher plays the piano—her periodic breaks would make the noise apparent to her.
Six has a pivotal role as a necessary helper throughout much of Little Nightmares II. Both characters must pull together to open specific passageways, jump simultaneously to make an object fall, or jointly pull on planks of wood to remove them. Each character also has to save the other as part of the required story. Although co-op is introduced in the third game, the seeds are sown here. And should the player die in a section with or without Six present, they quickly respawn in the same exact room or area or close to it.
Intellectual Content
Without insisting on a particular philosophical underpinning or even clarifying if its events are in an actual dream, Little Nightmares II explores logical possibility and the metaphysics of dreams to some extent. Nothing logically impossible can occur in dreams anymore than it can in waking life or any other context (a part of the universe away from observers, etc.). Logical axioms and all that stems from them can only be true, the former intrinsically so and the latter by standing on the former, so there is no such thing as "dream logic" and other forms of it. There is only the necessary truths of logic that transcend all else; there would still be a logical reason why logic is not true, and thus it simply cannot be false. To be possible, something must be consistent with logical necessities, as are many things which would likely strike someone as strange (floating objects, a teacher with a neck that rapidly elongates, and so on).
Now, there is dream imagery, which might or might nor correspond with the imagery in waking life, none of which necessarily corresponds to an external, material world rather than the mind perceiving it; still, however difficult to initially discover it is, there is a way to prove that some form of matter exists and that one is not dreaming because one is interacting with it [1]. The only thing inherent to the nature of dream imagery, with the laws of logic being separate from both mental imagery of all kinds and the physical world along with the laws of physics operating in it, is that it exists only within a dreaming consciousness. Otherwise, it would not be a component of a dream!
Mono and Six do not discuss or seemingly contemplate such things. It is unclear from the game alone if they are within a literal dream or some alternate physical world with differing laws of physics (but not of logic, since all necessary truths must still be true). Regardless, the game's themes of collaboration and friendship still naturally present themselves as teamwork lets the characters overcome miscellaneous horrors, particularly exemplified by the mysterious child found in the first section of the game (later revealed to be Six) helping the player's character hold up a shotgun to fire at a much larger attacker. What the game does explicitly acknowledge, albeit without almost any dialogue, is that working with others can be in the benefit of all involved in the collaboration, to the point of saving their lives. All else, including the contrasting ways children and adults are depicted, might very well be merely utilized for narrative purposes and visual atmosphere instead of to promote anything allegedly true about children and adults.
Conclusion
Little Nightmares II stands tall thanks to its unique premise, art style, and emphasis on a child's vulnerability before nightmare-esque entities. It winds up being a well-constructed 2.5D platforming game that revels in ambiguity. The sights and gameplay style might not be for everyone, particularly players who dislike having to rely so much on evasion. It is not the longest game. Yet there is much worthy of admiration in this surreal tale of teamwork, survival, and tragedy—the very end has ramifications for the entirety of the game beforehand!
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