With the game "Little Nightmares 2", little nightmares for big children -

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  • Four years after the first game,

    Little Nightmares 2

    has been available since Thursday on PS4 / 5, Xbox One / Series, Nintendo Swtich, PC and Stadia.

  • It is in the spirit of dark and strange platform games à la

    Limbo

    and

    Inside.

  • The player must guide Mono, a child with a bag on his head, through a world of sizzling screens and zombified spectators.

With

Limbo

in 2010, the Danish studio Playdead proved that the platform game was not limited to the colorful Mario, Sonic or Crash Bandicoot, with its anonymous boy immersed in a black and white, hostile and suffocating universe.

Critical and public success, the game gave birth to several spiritual heirs, starting with

Inside

from the same studio, but also

Little Nightmares

from the Swedes of Tarsier Studios.

Known for fun

Little Big Planet

, they were venturing into "a world as described by a child frightened by a nightmare," to quote game writer Dave Mervik.

Fears of children ... and parents

Little Nightmares 2

takes up the same concept of a strange, sinister, distorted world, not so far from a film by Tim Burton, Jean-Pierre Jeunet or David Lynch.

He just changes heroes, and Mono, a little boy with a bag on his head, replaces Six, the little girl in the yellow raincoat from the first game. But Six has not disappeared either, since she accompanies Mono, and therefore the player, from the scary forest where he wakes up to a mysterious tower… 5G?

Like its elders,

Little Nightmares 2

is deliberately obscure and cryptic about its history, which is revealed in touches without ever giving in its entirety.

But between its sizzling television screens and its zombified viewers, there is no doubt that the title is intended to be a critique of the all-screen and the all-connected.

Rather a parents' nightmare, while the other figures come more from the imagination and the fears of childhood: playground bullies, a sadistic mistress, a masked hunter, a very slender man skinny man ...

Moments of dread and poetry

Riddles, chases and, little novelty, fights, the player must do everything to escape this waking nightmare, and it must be said, sometimes seductive.

This is the paradox, or the feat of

Little Nightmares 2

.

Moments of fear and tension can succeed a time of poetry, thanks to a play of light and shadow, an artistic direction, a living painting… and there, there are hands sticking out of the walls!

Ahhhh!

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