After a half-hour of headset-on play in an early section of Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echos, I feel optimistic about the franchise’s jump to VR. While its 3D levels may dilute some of the precise puzzle-platforming I’ve come to enjoy from the ‘pancake’ (i.e. non-VR) entries in the series, its charmingly grotesque critters, tense stealth, and cheeky puzzles have seemingly all made the jump. But the differences from its predecessors that VR brings to the table might be the most interesting part of my demo.
Little Nightmares has always succeeded in making you feel small—often helpless. But that’s really the first thing that hit me the moment I stepped into Dark Six’s shoes in first person. As I pitter-pattered around a dreary train station, that’s really what stood out. Suddenly, things that felt secondary in previous flat games, like picking up and lugging around a big diode to pop into a circuit breaker, felt extremely weighty. Where detailed animations once sold something so laborious, when playing with a more objective camera, bending over and picking something up with both hands in first-person, as it drags next to your feet, hammers home how weak you are.
But the developers don’t use the personal sense of scale and perspective that VR provides as a crutch. The chunk I played felt just as moody and tense as the other games in the series. I constantly felt like I was being watched. Sometimes literally, as security cameras locked on and followed me across cavernous terminals, bag rooms full of luggage, and derelict offices littered with ominous, sparingly scattered human remains.
Starting out pushing luggage carts around as I got my VR legs back while getting used to looking around with a FOV restricted by Six’s hood, the gameplay itself is remarkably similar to the non-VR Little Nightmares, but in first-person. Eventually, I made it out of the leathery trove into a massive station terminal. This was when the sense of scale really started to hit. While still abstract in exactly the way you’d hope from this style of offbeat horror, the terminal felt much more real. As its massive, malfunctioning clock ticked back and forth, I felt like vermin, scurrying from corner to corner as the cameras leered at me.
A series of doors ominously opening in front of and behind me brought me to the station’s office. I spent a bulk of my college years doing IT maintenance in silent, spider-webbed offices and classrooms abandoned for Zoom classes during the pandemic, which revealed just how unsettling the modern office is, especially a silent one. This has made the contemporary office one of my favorite settings for horror, so that room was an unexpected highlight.
It did reveal my biggest gameplay issue, though: While Little Nightmares has dabbled in 3D in specific chunks, it mostly functions as a 2D game, occasionally playing with perspective. But building fully explorable 3D levels makes puzzles much more complex. Whether that complexity works or not tends to make or break the jump. In this case, it’s kind of a mixed result. One puzzle had me swapping in diodes into a circuit breaker to turn the power back on at the station. I tried different ones scattered throughout the room, but none worked.
After running from pillar to post, a small blue light underneath a desk caught my eye. Maybe it was the dark lighting in the room, but I just didn’t notice it. In fact, I walked right past it, not noticing the blue light was coming from a diode on the floor. This is a small issue, but I’m always frustrated when I can’t understand a puzzle just because I literally can’t see the missing piece. Again, this is a small problem, but when a camera is completely under the developer’s control, like in every other game in the series, giving the player a free camera while designing things with the same philosophy might overcomplicate what should be simple puzzles.
From there, I slunk through yet another impressive setpiece—an endless sea of people walking in unison between the station and the train. I worked my way to a car between their legs as they started, stopped, and started again. My perspective hardly put me up to their ankles, again reinforcing that immense sense of scale that I really liked in this demo.
Once on the train, I encountered a menagerie of grotesque creatures. All human-ish, but reduced to their most base, animal sensibilities, I dodged the watchful eye of a lizard-like conductor who patrolled the various cars of the train. He’s one of my new favorite monsters from the series, walking on all fours, almost like a komodo dragon. At the slightest sound, he’d crane his neck to catch stowaways in unassuming places. He got me a few times.
I really liked what I’ve played of Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes. While I have some concerns about the series’ translation into 3D, most of the demo felt right at home in the series. Aided by a more personal perspective and sense of scale, this entry is both different and similar to the originals in cool ways. I have faith that the rest of the game will live up. Thankfully, I won’t have to wait long, since it’s launching on Meta Quest 2 and 3, PS VR2, and Pico on April 24th.
