“So many issues, so many arms clipping through walls,” says Göransson. How do you create a walk for a sightless figure with a huge head, incredibly short legs and incredibly long arms? “I think both of us cringe a little bit inside when we hear the Janitor,” says Ottvall. Which makes Göransson and Ottvall’s work (along with some animation by cinematic artist Patrik Johansson) all the more impressive, given the bodies they had to animate. You can see each of these broad influences in the way Little Nightmares’ cast moves, their awkwardness offset by a weird elegance. The team liked the way they make horrible things like the figure that haunts Ring somehow graceful, instilling a sense of respect in the viewer. “We liked how robotic and cheesy it is they couldn’t make them very well, but it also gave this creepy feeling.” The last pattern was Japanese horror and anime.

In fact, the scene in which Freddy Krueger appears in an alley with incredibly long arms and scrapes his claws along the fence directly inspired Little Nightmares’ Janitor character. “With the cheesy movement,” says Ottvall, like Nightmare on Elm Street. There were old stop-motion children’s films with things like dolls with human faces. “It was a really creepy folder to look into,” says Ottvall.Īnd as the collection grew, they found three patterns. Instead of looking at the exaggerated stretching and squashing of most Pixar and CG animation today, Tarsier art director Per Bergman and lead animator Marcus Ottvall first started collating a set of gifs of horror scenes that they liked. “It was nice when it wasn’t perfect motion, when it was crooked in some ways, and they were eerie to watch.” “We didn’t want Pixar animation, perfect fluid motion and stuff like that,” animator Mattias Göransson tells me. Spoilers lie ahead, obv! No story secrets as such, though, just showing several scenes from throughout the game. It wasn’t easy to reach that special state of uncanniness, especially for a small team working on its first original game, but developer Tarsier Studios started in just the right place: Their staggering, shuffling and lumbering captures the flavour of the Czech stop-motion cartoons I spent a great deal of my childhood feeling unnerved by. Disproportioned and baggy in places they shouldn’t be, the way they look is one thing, but it’s the way they move that really clinches the deal.

The figures you encounter in Little Nightmares are grotesque. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games.

The little nightmares 2 characters