Games Like Little Nightmares: Small, Dark and Unsettling

The obvious next step is the rest of the series. Little Nightmares II follows Mono with Six through a forest, a school, a hospital and a city of TV-struck people, and Little Nightmares III, now made by Supermassive Games, brings two new friends, Low and Alone, and lets you play it with a friend online. REANIMAL is the new game from Tarsier Studios, who made the first two: a brother and sister cross a flooded, monster-filled island to rescue their friends, with a second player in local or online co-op. On phones, Very Little Nightmares is a tap-to-move puzzle prequel set in the same world. With a VR headset, Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes puts you inside that world in first person, as Dark Six, solving puzzles and escaping giants.

For the same side-on, sneak-and-solve play, Playdead's LIMBO and INSIDE are where much of it began. In LIMBO a boy searches for his sister through a black-and-white world of giant spiders, traps and other children who want him dead; in INSIDE a boy alone is hunted by men, dogs and worse as he is drawn into a dark project. Neither has a word of dialogue, and both die often and suddenly. They Breathe is a half-hour cousin: a small frog swimming down through a flooded forest, learning without words what the creatures around it really are. DARQ is close too. A boy trapped in a lucid nightmare walks on walls and ceilings, turns rooms around and slips past creatures he cannot fight, all without a word of dialogue. Bramble: The Mountain King moves to a third-person view and to dark Nordic fables, as a boy goes after his sister through forests and caves full of folklore monsters.

If what you love is the child's-eye view, Among the Sleep puts you in the body of a two-year-old searching for their mother at night, with a teddy bear for company and a home that turns into a dream world. Yomawari: Night Alone sends a little girl with a flashlight through her night-time town, hiding from spirits that can kill her in one touch. Baby Blues Nightmares makes you even smaller: a toddler searching dark playrooms for five lost toys while monsters listen for every footstep, and if you get too scared you start to cry and give yourself away.

For the storybook darkness, Fran Bow and Little Misfortune by Killmonday Games are hand-drawn tales of young girls in grim, surreal worlds, and The Midnight Walk, made from real clay in stop motion, has you carry a small flame through tales of fire and darkness while monsters try to snuff it out. Poppy Playtime is the toy-factory cousin: a first-person puzzle game in which the factory's mascots come after you. Creepy Tale 3: Ingrid Penance and Creepy Tale: Some Other Place are hand-drawn, side-view dark fairy tales of puzzles and monsters: in the first a spoiled girl falls into a hell of creatures that want to swallow her, in the second a fishing trip leads a boy into an eerie forest land where he must find the way home. Children of Silentown is a hand-drawn tale of a girl whose village sits in a forest of monsters, where people keep disappearing. The Little Red Lie is a free side-scroller that picks up after Little Red Riding Hood: Red returns to the forest where her grandmother died, hiding from monsters and solving small puzzles, with three endings.

Clea is the closest in its hiding: a girl leads her little brother through the side-on halls of a mansion where escaped monsters roam in real time and come at every noise, so you listen for footsteps and peek under doors. Bye Sweet Carole wears the look of a classic animated film over a dark story, as a girl searches an orphanage and a storybook kingdom for her missing friend.

If you only try one, play DARQ for the closest feel of play, or Among the Sleep to be a child too small to fight back.

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