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.

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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