Perhaps you have in mind films that traumatized you as a child but which would no longer produce the same effect today. Many say they were unable to finish Spirited Away being younger. After all, imagining your parents turning into a shamelessly gorging pig is enough to terrify many little cherubs. For my part, it’s the film The City of Lost Children who terrified me. Its outrageous characters and disturbing close-ups generated in me a feeling of intense unease that gave me nightmares for many months. And if I mention these two films to you, it is not insignificant. Both served as inspiration for the title that interests us in this new Cash Memory, Little Nightmares.
We draw our inspiration from many sources. Among other things, we are inspired by Ghibli films and also City of Lost Children
Get the monsters out from under the bed
This is absolutely not surprising. Both symbolize the difference in perception between adults and children and this is essential for Tarsier Studios. The Swedish studio actually plans to develop a title exploiting childhood trauma, these little fears that are often irrational but fundamentally disturbing. This is far from being ridiculous, since it is a subject or at least a feeling that speaks to everyone. If everyone’s fears are different, all the players have one day gone through this situation which is to be a frightened child for a futile reason – Uncle Didier’s big hands, Auntie Jacqueline’s unhealthy smile or whatever. Presenting a small protagonist lost in the scary world of adults is enough to explore a wide range of potential fears in which the majority of players will inevitably find themselves.
What’s more, it also allows you to stand out in a very competitive genre which struggles to offer new experiences. This dichotomy of childhood innocence/horror is far from being new in the 2010s since many films have already tackled it. Tim Burton is also one of the representatives. And it even has a name, the charming horror. But rare are the video games to have relied on it before Tarsier Studios.
The job description corresponds particularly to the studio. He is indeed familiar with the more childish aesthetics and mechanics. We owe him the LittleBigPlanet. As Dennis Talajic, lead designer of the title, will simply summarize, the studio is simply banking on a “dark version of Little Big Planet.†It is therefore around this that the Hungry of Tarsier Studiosbecame Little Nightmares afterwards.
It’s not the little beast that’s going to kill the big one
That’s for theory. But how to bring it to life in practice? Little Nightmares will rely on two fundamental pillars: exaggeration and vulnerability. The first is what will visually bring it closer to Tim Burton’s productions, although the studio denies having used the man’s works as a source of inspiration. Little Nightmaresthis visual excess comes above all from the approach of the artistic director, which Dave Mervik described in these terms: “identify the very essence of things, isolate the elements that make up this identity, then amplify them, transform them and distort them until they acquire a new and own life.†Added to this creative vision is this relationship to childhood which tends to exaggerate everything. In the eyes of a cherub, everything indeed looks bigger, more misshapen, more extraordinary, stronger and more frightening.
Vulnerability is also part of this lineage. Because if everything seems stronger and more frightening, we can only feel more vulnerable. This is why we find ourselves not only with a young protagonist, but also with gameplay that puts combat aside to focus on a giant game of hide and seek in a scary world: “We heard about infiltration, but we wanted to avoid that, because it gives the impression of absolute power. Hiding and sneaking isn’t what we had in mind anymore… a expliqué Mervik, “that’s what we did when we were little: hide, sneak, explore.†And it is therefore these two aspects, coupled with a completely silent environmental narration – which also fits with the propensity that children have to write stories in their heads starting from nothing or almost – which will create the formula Little Nightmares. A formula which has existed since April 28, 2017, which continues today as best it can and has even created children, like a frightening story which is transmitted from generation to generation to its children, around a fire.
