Little Nightmares is a great game.
The atmospheric tension and suspense that accompanies running through the mysterious
Maw is nothing short of mastery for an indie title.
I could say the exact same thing for the first two DLCs, but let me tell you something: This
new DLC is so damn frustrating that it nearly killed my love for the game.
Like seriously, I’m not kidding.
There was cursing, there was anger, sanity breaks had to be taken.
Calming cheese had to be eaten.
Yes, eating cheese calms me.
Don't judge!
It was that kind of rage inducing gameplay.
And before I go on a gnome infused tirade, yes we are going to get into the lore and
story that are revealed in this DLC.
But I feel like it’s necessary to give you some insight into the playability of the update
before we jump straight into the lore because they are connected in more ways than one.
Oh, and as always with anything new that just came out that we happen to cover in a video:
Spoilers shall be thrust asunder!
I uh, have no idea what “thrust asunder” means.
Hit it!
The gameplay for this DLC was nothing short of pure frustration.
The controls for Little Nightmares have always been a bit wonky, but the puzzle solving and
progression of the game has always been more or less linear, making it easy enough to stay
on track.
Meanwhile, The Hideaway DLC is over here deciding to go all emo and stubborn.
“I don’t conform to your linear gameplay.
That’s what The Man wants, fucking conformists.”
This update is the black swan of the Little Nightmare’s franchise.
It’s the South Park goth kid of the indie horror genre.
Since the game isn’t linear this time, it was confusing as to whether or not you were
in the right place doing the right thing.
The puzzles were complicated in a way that isn’t fun or challenging, but confusing.
What makes a puzzle good and challenging is when you know where you are and what you’re
trying to achieve.
Think about a word search or sudoku or even a maze.
The answer is right in front of you, you know what you’re trying to do, and the fun comes
from solving the puzzle.
Portal is a great example of puzzle gameplay perfected.
You could always see your end destination and it was up to you and your brainium to
figure out how to get there.
But the puzzles in this DLC weren’t designed in a way gives you that satisfaction.
They were designed to give you hemorrhoids.
Instead of being at point A and trying to get to point B, you’re at point A and don’t
even know where point B is or what it looks like!
The perfect example is this monstrosity of a section where you gotta sneak by The Janitor
to get to the next room.
Once you’re in the next room Mr. Noodle Arms is going to come to get you and you have
no clue where the fuck to go.
I tried to get through a door at the end of the room a few too many times before I realized
I needed to go up these hard to see stairs in the back instead.
The game doesn’t give you any clues or ideas that what you might be doing is wrong, and
you don’t have enough time to stand around and figure it out before an udon noodle grabs
you.
The result isn’t a lack of feeling like you're failing solving the puzzle, but a lack
understanding what the actual puzzle is.
That’s enough about the gameplay for now, let's take a look at what the game teaches
us.
The mystery of Little Nightmares thickens in The Hideaway, but we do gain some insights
into what the hell is happening on this deathtrap of a water vessel thingy.
Incase you’ve forgotten, this ship has a lot of untold mysteries.
There’s a prison for children with electrified bars on either side that is accompanied by
a scary nursery and a cafeteria.
When you finally get out of that part of the Maw in the main game you get the achievement
“The Prison” with the description “Look how the canary has flown it’s cage!”.
If that isn’t defining proof that you and all these other children are stuck in a prison,
I don’t know what is.
I bring this up because this prison is important to the DLC’s story.
When we were first playing Little Nightmares we only had guesses as to why these children
were being imprisoned.
But now, we have some solid concrete answers with this 3rd DLC.
So let’s dive into this update of the game and I’ll try not to completely ruin the
experience with my opinion of how this DLC plays.
First off, let’s take a trip down memory lane in terms of Little Nightmares.
The story thus far has revolved around a little girl named Six and a boy who is called “The
Runaway Kid”.
Just so I don’t go tone deaf saying The Runaway Kid over and over, let’s call him
RK.
Last time we hung out with this kid of poor hair design, he had just been trapped by the
blind, inflatable tube-man janitor.
Our story continues with RK being ransacked into well.. a sack, and hoisted onto one of
those moving hooks we see in the main game.
As the hook continues to move it looks like RK’s sack was either cut before he was put
in or he was able to cut it from the inside.
Either way, he falls out of the bag and down to the ground on a pile of coal where he is
surrounded by curious gnomes.
The gnomes play a large part in this DLC, and induced the first known instance of “gnome
rage”, an anger created by gnomes being assholes and not helping you when you want
them to.
For you see, this DLC is the gnome dlc!
Every puzzle, every obstacle, everything you do must be done with a gnome at your side.
Don’t have a gnome?
Well goll-ey do I have a surprise for you, just check any turned over drawer or filing
cabinet and you’re sure to find at least one gnome friend for all your gnomey needs!
And I don’t know about you, but I named every gnome I worked with.
There was Norman, and Inky and Blinky, Wilfred and Mangoo..oh and we can’t forget about
Eithel!
It helps to give gnomes names so when you’re yelling at them it feels more real.
Yes, I do have gnome anger issues now.
Anyway, you get to this first door and help a gnome out who was a little too fat to fit
through the crack in it.
When you pick up a gnome, this weird omniscient music plays that makes you feel like you just
did something super wrong.
Like, I have no clue what just happened underneath that slightly racist looking gnome hat, but
Norman is all about following me around now.
When you pick up your first gnome the game gives you one of its very uncommon displays
of instruction, particularly, how to throw an “object”.
I guess the creators of Little Nightmares don’t see gnomes as people, just objects.
Not cool guys, gnomes are people too!
Anywho, you work with Norman to find and free other gnomes and do that mystic voodoo to
make them follow you.
Eventually RK ends up in what looks like a furnace room.
This room, not that you’d have any way to tell, is essentially your hub for the game.
You’ll be coming back to this room a few times with gnome recruits that become your
slave labor towards progression.
You leave your gnomes to their coal work and progress forward, sneaking by Mr. Noodle Arms
as we said earlier, you eventually arrive in this room.
This room was another issue I had with the DLC.
Everything we knew up to this point was that doors with handles need to be opened by the
handle.
So I’m jumping, I’m looking for a gnome friend to throw, I’m doing everything I
can think of to figure out how to open these cabinets or climb up the shelves without the
cabinets.
And instead, all you have to do is grab the side of the cabinet to open it.
Super easy, if the game had at any point had something like that before.
What I knew about the game completely contradicted this room, and that’s one of the reasons
why I felt like the puzzles weren’t up to par with the rest of the series.
But I digress, you do a bunch of stuff, go on a mission to find some working fuses just
to get to another one of my least favorite parts of the game, this room of torture.
After freeing two gnomes that someone figured out how to get themselves stuck in a filing
cabinet, you need to bring them under your command.
Easy right?
No, it’s not!
One of these assholes runs away from you in a circle around these boxes.
Why?
I don’t know, but it’s dumb.
How does that make the game fun?
I know I need him for the puzzle, why does he have to be an asshole and run away from
me?
And I can’t even corner him cuz he’s running around in a goddamn circle!
It was infuriating that I needed to deal with catching a runaway gnome I’d saved from
a life of filing when I’m preoccupied figuring out the rest of this bullshit.
It was just..urghhh.
It was really annoying.
Oh, and he’s not the only gnome to run away from you.
Another one does it in a pile of coal where you’re even slower.
Isn’t that dandy?
So you save them all, bring them back down to the furnace room, and they start chucking
coal into the furnace too.
Here’s where the nonlinear aspect of the game makes progression confusing.
You assume that you’re supposed to continue going to the right because that’s been the
goal in every other part of the series, but there’s nothing else to do that way.
You actually have to go back a little and find a ladder in the furnace room that wasn’t
accessible to you when you first walked into the room.
On top of that, whenever that ladder does drop, when you have enough gnomes doing coal
work or whatever, it’s not on screen if you’re looking at the furnace, so there’s
no way to know that the ladder is now accessible unless you walk back to look at it.
Then once you go up the ladder the first entrance you’re able to go into is actually where
you’re supposed to come out at the end of saving more gnomes.
So that makes everything even more confusing and frustrating.
Sorry, this DLC just wasn’t designed well compared to the rest of the series.
I can’t stress that enough.
Moving on you jump through some more hoops to save some more gnomes, including the one
that runs away from you in the coal pit.
But ugh, ok so you end up in this room with a mining cart suspended in mid air.
There’s a window you can walk through to get to the room on the left here.
Now that window isn’t impossible to see, but trying to figure out the boxes behind
it and what is and isn’t climbable was goddamn impossible.
I was actually trying to mess with my monitor’s settings just so I could see what I was trying
to do without the flashlight, cuz as soon as you hold onto something you can’t use
the flashlight and couldn’t see anything.
Anyway, you eventually finagle your way into that room, save more gnomes and bring them
back to the furnace room so you can beat the DLC.
With that many gnomes putting coal into the furnace, the conveyer belt behind you begins
to actually work, allowing you to rise up to the next level where you find the gnome’s
home, a small furnace room where they have pictures hanging up of children and some dolls.
It’s pretty creepy all in all.
Past that room you end up on an elevator with the Geisha inside it.
Then the DLC ends.
So what did this DLC teach us, well, it basically gave us no new information about Six or RK.
What it did give us was some insight into the gnomes, where they come from, and why
they’re here.
In one of the earliest rooms if you shine your flashlight on the back wall there’s
a picture sketched out of children, an eye, and gnomes.
According to this picture, The eyes that we see everywhere, or maybe even the Geisha women’s
gaze, can turn people into gnomes.
Remember when I said “Gnomes are people too!”
earlier, yeah that was a setup for this part right here.
That’s where the gnomes came from, and that’s what the prison is for.
It’s essentially a future gnome prison.
This is also backed up by the gnomes having drawn pictures of children in their home and
children’s toys.
Now we should take into account that this DLC is called the hideaway.
A hideaway generally refers to a place used as a retreat or hiding place, aka where the
gnomes live.
These are the gnomes that have survived.
Think about what’s happened to RK, he began in a sack being taken up to the kitchens.
As we’ve seen from the main game with Six, those sacks stop there, those children most
likely are turned into gnomes and then eaten.
But some gnomes, have escaped, and they hide in that upper level furnace room for safety,
probably scared out of their minds and only going out in search of food.
Who knows, they may even have to move from place to place to make sure they aren’t
found.
That would be very...Gnome-atic of them…
I need to stop watching Game Theory, it’s ruining my humor and turning me to puns.
I’m sorry everyone, I’ll try to be better.
What this DLC shows us is that that this story isn’t even close to over.
RK’s journey so far is only just beginning and we’ll definitely see another update
featuring him in the future.
In all honesty, this update didn’t advance the plot at all, it only filled in the plot
holes about where the gnomes came from.
However we still don’t know why these children are being turned into gnomes and eaten or
why the Geisha is running this insane operation.
Of course we do have some theories, but we’ve already talked about them in this video and
this video.
So if you’re interested and haven’t seen them yet, go ahead and check them out.
And if you’re still confused or have some questions for us, why not check out our discord
or patreon where you’re welcome to ask us questions and talk with us.
That’s all from me today guys, this update was great for certain parts of the lore, but
the gameplay…
I think I need some time in the fetal position.
So I’ll talk to you all later.