Why is a game scary? What is it about the mix of ingredients that really chills us, that really creeps inside and messes with our subconscious? I don’t think it’s the jump-scares. I don’t think it’s the gore. I think it’s something deeper, something more unsettling, something insidious. And there are few games that trade in this kind of fear better than the Little Nightmares series by Swedish studio Tarsier.
Little Nightmares 2 interviewDeveloper: Tarsier StudiosPublisher: Bandai NamcoAvailability: Releases 11th February 2021, on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch. Playable on PS5 and Xbox S/X. An update will apparently follow to enhance it for the newer machines.
The long-awaited sequel is a little under two weeks away now (it releases on 11th February). I had a chance to play Little Nightmares 2 recently, and wrote about it. A demo was also released earlier this month for you to try. Did you? What did you think? Were you as scared of The Teacher as I was?
I’ve been thinking about her, and about the game, since. I’ve been thinking about what it means for something to be scary, and how Tarsier manifests terror and frightens us. I’ve been thinking about fear. And I couldn’t think of a better person to ask about it than Dave Mervik, senior narrative designer on the game, and the person who dreamt a lot of the world up.
What follows is our long and winding chat about the origins of the project, fear, formulas, and expectations.
I don’t want to take too much of the interview with where it all came from, but it was the lifeblood of the company from the very start. A whole bunch of different factors just coalesced and came together, and ten years later, we got the chance to make the Hunger prototype.
You mentioned seeing the world through different eyes. I’ve seen you mention that before. Is that a founding idea of Little Nightmares?
Dave Mervik: I guess so. It’s just something that we naturally do. I don’t want to sound pretentious-
You don’t!
Dave Mervik: Damnit, I’ll try harder [laughs]!
But it’s just the way we work. […] We’re talking about ideas that we care about, and this is all filtered through the theme of the game. In the first game was greed and consumption, and hunger obviously, and this [game] is escapism.
One of the main pillars of Little Nightmares is how does a kid see the world? It’s one of the founding principles of this IP. How the kids experience the world in this very exaggerated fashion.
So when you all first got together on Little Nightmares, then called Hunger, what was the original idea you had for it?
Dave Mervik: It was a bunch of different original ideas. It was a camera system that the tech team had done some months before, which was called the dollhouse camera. And it was just showing how fun it was to rotate a building and then zoom into it and see something going on in there. And that just stayed there. And then a bunch of us were talking about the kind of games that we used to love, like Heart of Darkness and Flashback and Another World, which didn’t hold your hand but just dropped you into another world… literally [laughs]. […] Then the concept team started drawing things that really stuck with them. It was all these things. And suddenly, the opportunity came up for us to start working on a concept because we found out there were funds to be had. And, hang on, we could actually do something here because we were coming to the natural end of our time with Sony and [Media Molecule]. It was all of these things coming together.