Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes Review – Makes Being Small Very Scary

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes Review

Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes brings the Little Nightmares universe to VR for the first time, thanks to game developer Iconik. This is the fourth Little Nightmares game and returns us to the character of Six, the little girl from the first game. The developers split Six in two this time, and you control the half known as Dark Six. Dark Six’s goal is to reunite with Light Six and return to being Six. Timeline-wise, this game takes place between the first and second games. Thanks to VR, for the first time, you can truly experience the scale of being small.

The Little Nightmares games are puzzle-platformer games designed to focus on the wild extremes of childhood. This means the developers designed the environments on a scale to match a child’s viewpoint. So everything is two-thirds larger than it is from an adult’s perspective. This scale switch does wonders to the feeling of the world around you. An ordinary room, say a kitchen, that adults move through with nary a thought, is fraught with danger for a child. Everyday objects like chairs and tables become obstacles to overcome. Normal exits are impassable because the doorknobs are out of reach. So we must find alternate paths, usually via routes that introduce danger because of heights and room objects that can cut, burn, or hinder progress.

The Little Nightmares games have done a powerful job of impressing a child’s perspective on the player. This VR version takes that viewpoint to a higher level. Looking up at a door, the doorknob out of reach, or down a hallway, with the ceiling sky-high, is so much more visceral. Players can truly feel helpless, small, and weak in this game. There is also a level of frustration that comes from Six’s fragility that makes you empathize with the character even more. The game also takes advantage of her limitations in the level design. Things are always just out of reach. Or you have to navigate a seemingly impossible barrier.

The first-person view in this Little Nightmares game further emphasizes the disturbing world scale. Dark Six must navigate a nightmarish world where every object, every room, and every corridor feels slightly wrong. Dark Six must reunite with herself to escape a deadly fate. She must navigate a world where reality and nightmares blend. As she travels through this world, Dark Six comes face-to-face with the tragic fate of other children who did not successfully make it out.

Dark Seeking Light

The world plays with Dark Six’s mind too. You experience fragments of her past. But twisted ones. Hence the subtitle – Altered Echoes. These distorted experiences make you question your own existence and where you belong. Your journey is not only one of escape but of self-discovery, with the realization that you are changing into someone new.

With my playthrough of the game, I can confirm that Iconik achieved its goals from a storytelling perspective. The feelings of being small and powerless, along with a constant sense of dread and anxiety, were with me at all times. The game’s graphic design brought back echoes of the artwork used during the school sequences of Pink Floyd’s – The Wall. Adult characters are humongous, ugly, and scary. Furniture has distorted proportions. Cabinets have a Salvador Daliesque liquid and drooping nature.

Even your movement through the world adds to the mood. The world is so big and your steps are so small. A journey down a hallway feels like a cross-country trek. This holds true even when you run. As such, the need to stay out of sight of adults becomes paramount. It became a habit to stop at every corner to take a peek to make sure the coast was clear. To sneak past adults means seeking cover behind chair and table legs. You will stick to the shadows. All the while you seek a way out.

Given the dark nature of the game, discovering the right way to proceed is difficult on default settings. Thankfully, the developers offer an option to highlight interactive objects. It lowers the risk factor, but I found it a fair trade-off because there were times I did not know how to proceed . This was especially true during one of the five game levels – the library. This level is full of samey environmental elements such as bookcases and books. Because of the gloomy nature of the game, picking out specific items to interact with is very difficult.

Low Light Levels Mean Mura

Speaking of the game’s gloomy lighting, an understandable choice given the game’s tone, it touches on one of the pain points on the PSVR 2. In a word: mura. Mura comes from a Japanese term meaning unevenness, irregularity, or lack of uniformity. This dirty window texture comes from the inconsistencies in OLED display panels, which the PSVR 2 has. It is most noticeable during low-light scenes where there is little color contrast. Unfortunately, Little Nightmares VR has a ton of such environments. Fortunately, turning down the headset’s brightness can mitigate it. Or, if the game has it, lowering the gamma setting. Such a setting is available in this game, but even altering these two settings won’t entirely eliminate mura. How much mura bothers you differs from person to person.

While the mura issue is specific to the PSVR 2, there are two puzzling VR settings that all VR gamers will have issues with. The first is an aesthetic choice. Dark Six wears a hooded raincoat, and Iconik has incorporated the hood into the first-person viewpoint. From an artistic viewpoint, it makes sense, but from a VR immersion viewpoint, it does not. Veteran VR gamers hate vignettes. Vignettes decrease the field of view to reduce the risk of motion sickness. FOV in VR games is a bigger issue than in flat games because of the limitations of current VR tech and the sense of immersion. Vignettes are like horse blinders. They reduce immersion. Hopefully, the devs will listen to feedback and make the inclusion of the hood optional.

The other VR option issue is the absence of smooth turning. The reason for not including it is not obvious. Technically, the game runs fine, so that can’t be the reason there is only snap turning. Snap turning is another VR comfort to reduce VR motion sickness. It also does so at the reduction of immersion. Immersion is the holy grail of VR. Like the hood, hopefully the devs will offer a smooth turn option in the future.

Despite a few shortcomings, Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is an engrossing journey. Fans and newcomers to the franchise can enjoy the gifts this game offers. Feeling small and powerless is an experience that makes one appreciate life in the adult world. It also gives a new appreciation of how children feel about the world. This game’s VR heightens all these feelings found in the Little Nightmares universe. If you like games of suspense and mystery with a tinge of scary, check this one out.

***PSVR 2 Game Code provided by publisher***