Little Nightmares is far outside of my normal gameplay choices and my comfort zone, so my progress through the game is quite inefficient. I am NOT a fan of horror games. I hate jump scares, I hate not knowing what's going on or who could be lurking out of sight, and I hate gore with no purpose but to be gory. Playing NieR: Automata was also pretty far from what I would normally play too, though, as I'm not big on RPG games, and that ended up being a really interesting experience for me, so I thought I'd give Little Nightmares a try. So far, it's interesting but also scaring me quite a bit. I often prefer to jump into a game without doing much research on it at all so as not to color my opinion before I've gotten to play for myself, but I finally had to look up what enemies might jump out at me during this first portion so that I'd be prepared and spend less time trying to predict what could be on the other side of obstacles and shadows. Yes, I know it's ridiculous to be so afraid of this, and my best friend is giving me some shit for it, but I've learned from having to practically be carried out of my first haunted house at age 10 that I really don't handle horror well. As a result, I've slowly dragged myself through what probably is only 10 minutes of gameplay. What I have found interesting is how much story seems to be present. I do really enjoy a strong story-driven game, and because of the nature of the other game options for this log I can guess that some of the imagery is relevant to the game and not just thrown in to make me uncomfortable. At the moment, I'm trying to determine how much of this is intended to be real and how much may just be the character's imagination or memory. The layout of the environment seems to indicate that it's all in his head, as the shapes and sizes of the rooms and their contents seem a little off. There's a man hanging in one of the rooms who seems quite long, especially compared to the size of the chair and mattress in the room with him. Perhaps this is the character's perception - Often things that are scary to us are felt and remembered to be larger. This is why the hallways often seem smaller when we return to our high school after graduation, we are no longer scared of the school like we were as incoming freshman so that perception is being altered. The fridge is also quite tall compared to the player character, the proportions wouldn't line up even if he were a newborn. Everything seems taller than it is wide, I'm just not sure if it's the character's discomfort showing through his misperception or if it's just meant to make the player feel uncomfortable. Further, who is the man who hung himself? Why does the camera shift as if I'm on a boat, but have a massive staircase and what looks like a house with a crumbling roof inside of it? Does the player character know him? What's with the slimy handprints dragged across the fridge? Who was dragged away from the fridge, by whom, why, and where are they now? I really wonder if there will be an answer to all this, since I'm guessing we're playing it due to an ethically interesting storyline, but I also know that horror games don't always explain themselves.
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