Nightmare Fuel / Little Nightmares

Little vandal, little beast, the Maw will punish you at the feast

Unmarked spoilers below!

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Main Game

• Any time and any way Six dies in the game, it is a horrifying experience to watch.
  • What makes it worse is half the time, you don't see her die. When the Janitor catches her, he just holds her and growls. Sometimes, when you're caught by the chefs, you might get to see them put Six on their cutting board and pull out a knife, only to have it fade to black before anything happens. Yikes!
    • It was stated somewhere that early versions of Six's death in the game were going to show Six being broken in half.
• After leaving the first area, you come across a room with a tall man who you can only see from the waist down who looks like he hanged himself. Even though there's what appears to be a suicide note nearby, his chair isn't flipped in the way to show that he did it himself, and panning the camera upwards reveals that his hands seem to be bound behind his back...
  • Adding to that, later in the same area, you find even more bodies on the ceiling...
• Everyone except maybe the Nomes and Six on the Maw.
  • Leeches, black two-legged slimy-looking creatures that suck blood through nasty suckers that tip their wormy bodies. What makes them even scarier? Their speed increases when they're in water.
  • The janitor is a waxen dwarf with unnaturally long arms who is blind due to skin sagging over his eyes. He communicates by making disturbing clicking and grinding noises with his jaw. He gets around by climbing the various shelves, book stacks, and pipes. His arms also allow him to reach much farther into smaller spaces.
  • The chefs wear these saggy, dead-eyed "masks" that almost look like they're actually someone else's skin. They're greasy and unkempt and wheezily lumber around their kitchen, occasionally letting out a horrible squeal when they spot intruders such as Six.
  • The Guests are just massive beings with faces that look like rubber, crawling and gorging themselves. The game's website implies they literally all eat themselves to death on the Maw with little care on what. And when they die, they're next on the menu.
  • The Lady. A slender, beautiful woman with a white mask that seems to flow through the air and just quietly observe everything that happens on her boat.
  • As of the DLC, we are introduced to a new monstrosity: the Granny, a shriveled old hag that stalks the Runaway Kid in the depths of the Maw, slowly following after him and dragging down into the water if he doesn't swim away fast enough.
• If you have Six go near the Janitor's arms after you cut them off, they will twitch and move towards Six. They're obviously harmless now, but it's still creepy to see it still moving.
• When either chef catches you, they start cooking Six on-screen if she's close enough to an interactable object, by dropping her in a pot of boiling water, throwing her into the oven, putting her on the cutting board, or jamming her inside a fish.
• As you watch the second chef chopping up some meat and tearing it open, it looks suspiciously like the head of a guest.
• It's possible that all the little figurines that the Janitor has stored are actually the smaller occupants like Six who got petrified after they were caught by one of the Eyes.
• At one point, Six jumps into a chute that's apparently meant for the disposal of shoes. For anyone who's seen Pan's Labyrinth or has read up on their history, this will already set off some alarm bells. As you move on, Six eventually falls into a room flooded with thousands of shoes.
• While the restaurant patrons are almost laughably large you wouldn't think they'd stop gorging themselves and attempt to chase Six. But if one spots her, they immediately fall to the floor and start crawling like a wild animal. Cue a chase.
  • When you enter the first main section of the restaurant, there is one patron that will throw a table to the side and start chasing you if it spots you (which it likely will). If you're standing to its right (relative to its position) as it throws the table, you can get crushed.
  • Not only that, one section involves walking down a corridor full of Japanese shōji doors. They immediately open up to reveal a huge, writhing mass of Guests, all hungry for Six. They crawl after her at top speed, clamoring and rolling over one another like a tsunami.
• Six gets so hungry she kills a trapped rat and eats part of it. Then later, a Nome. Finally, the Lady. The Nome is possibly the most nightmarish example, as it was already offering her a sausage to eat. She had a choice.
• The wrapped-up bodies being sent to the kitchen. Assuming Six is a human child, they are just around the right size to be adult humans. There are cartloads of them, and some are still wriggling.
• The Lady's Quarters, Aside from a few smashed mirrors and dusty dress dummies it is very pristine, but also hauntingly empty and devoid of life. There's also a viewing chamber near her room, and if Six accesses it, she can see throughout the entire Maw, meaning the lady can see all that happens in her domain.
• The Lady is very disturbing. She's a ghostly witch that controls shadows and chokes the life out of people. She keeps the engine of the maw running by casting a hypnotic spell, and allows fat greedy monsters to eat children she has most likely kidnapped.
  • She distinguishes herself from the brutish, dirty-looking staff of her Maw with her unnatural grace. For instance, rather than lumbering around after Six with outstretched arms, she glides across the floor and magically lifts Six off the ground when she catches her.
    • Speaking of which, the way the Lady kills Six is probably the worst death of the lot, though we don't get to see much. After she lifts Six into the air, a horrible, unearthly sound is heard, and as the screen Fades to Black, you can just make out the Lady psychically wringing Six's little body like a towel.
    • This contrast is played to eerie effect at one point when Six is sneaking about the Lady's chambers, the latter of whom is still unaware of Six's presence and quietly humming an eerie tune as she brushes her hair. In this segment, Six must tiptoe past the Lady, slip into her bedroom, and smash a pot to retrieve a key- a pot which is well within earshot of the Lady; as one would expect, the second the pot smashes, her humming goes quiet. Having already been through numerous similar situations with the Janitor and the Chefs- enemies who'd pace around and immediately rush to investigate suspicious sights and sounds- the player's first instinct is to quickly scramble into the convenient hiding space under the bed under the assumption that once again, they'd have to escape by ducking and weaving around the Lady as she investigates the area. But instead, nothing happens, and upon warily venturing back out, it becomes evident that the Lady is far more devious than the other enemies you faced; she simply vanished...
    • There's a closet in the room right next to where the Lady was brushing her hair, and as you make your way back through it, you're probably expecting that she's hidden in there, waiting to pop out the moment you walk by. She's not. The Lady is Nothing Is Scarier incarnate.
    • The mannequins strewn throughout her quarters make things ten times worse, because you never know if any of them might just be the Lady or not...
  • There's also the chilling possible implication that she is Six's mother, as she has at least one painting of a little girl wearing yellow that is covered by a tarp.
  • The phrase "casts a spell" takes a new meaning in the DLC where it's revealed the Nomes are responsible for feeding coal into the furnace to keep the engine going, and that at least some of them are transformed children.
• The Lady humming to herself as she combs her hair. It's unnerving when that's the only sound you hear in her entire room next to the ticking clock.
  • Six can be this as well when she hums her theme song after she's finished consuming something, which gets even scarier by the end of the game when her theme reprises into a deep booming score as she kills all of the customers. It's hard to tell whether she does this to cope with her situation, or just finds humming her own song fun.
• The Maw itself is just freakin' scary. It's a massive submarine like structure that attaches itself to the ocean floor like a crab, and acts as a kind of hotel/restaurant for dozens of morbidly obese "guests" that dress well but suddenly turn into rabid animals upon being given the food prepared by the cooks, which is implied to be either humans or other guests, making them one giant race of Cannibals.
  • The Janitor's territory, aptly named ''The Lair". An Abandoned Area found in the "Forgotten Parts" of the Maw filled to the brim with dusty objects, shoes and even entire sections of the Maw that seem to be decaying. What makes this place terrifying is the fact that the Janitor actively hunts you down throughout the level. Special props go to the final chase scene where the Janitor corners you to single room where Six is able to sever both of his arms using only a garage door and a cage.
  • If you flip the channels on the television set, the screen blinks into screens of the illuminati, and hand with an eye and what appears to be someone on a bed with a black figure, who looks similarly to the Janitor looming on the side of the screen.
• While its undeniably a Moment of Awesome and a superb case of Laser-Guided Karma, Six using her newly acquired shadow powers to massacre the Guests that try to stop her from leaving the Maw is honestly pretty chilling as the Guests scream, choke and die as the shadows seemingly drain the life from their bloated bodies, all while a Dark Reprise of Six's theme plays. Six may have escaped and shut down the Maw, but it's clear that her innocence has been shattered.
• Six eats a Nome, as stated above, when she had actual food in front of her face, if this is the last Nome you need for 100%, you get "Lost Little Things", an achievement for hugging Nomes that chillingly states that Kindness will be your undoing. Since the achievement descriptions are typically talking to or about Six, it can come off as a vague threat that the Nomes will Get even for her earning their trust and then murdering one of them.
• The website descriptions for the Maw and its occupants are chillingly written. In particular is the description of the Prison, where the Maw's foulest secrets are kept, and where what's implied to be children were lured with "fat promises" only to be locked away. Awaiting their turn.
• Whenever Six gets hungry, the lights will start to flicker, and during one flicker while she is eating, a dark version of herself appears somewhere nearby, watching her silently.
• If you manage to find and break all of the statues in the game, the reward title is "Rascal" and its description is pretty chilling.
  Little vandal, little beast, The Maw will punish you at the feast.
  • The reward you get for breaking all the statues is a mask that looks exactly like the one the Lady wears.
• When in the kitchen one of the chefs is butchering a piece of meat. That wouldn't be so bad, except the meat is still actively bleeding. For it to do that, it would have to be less than 10 hours dead. If there was any doubt that the body bags heading to the kitchen was a coincidence, something that is obviously a fresh death makes it bone chillingly obvious how this place is run.
• In the scene where the tidal wave of guests clamor over each other in pursuit of Six, the chase concludes with Six swinging across a chasm on a hanging lamp, and one of the guests ends up tumbling over the ledge. She screams as she falls and if you listen closely, you can hear a small "splat"-like sound down below.
• Just what happened to the World to make the guests so enormous? What happened to the world that made it so they have nothing better to do than apparently eat themselves to death?

Comic

• Six encounters a group of kids gathered around a campfire and barely gets acquainted with them when one of them gets eaten by a Leech. A girl explains to Six that their campfire doesn't always keep the Leeches back.
• The comic also introduces the Ferryman, a sagging man in a fedora with a melting face. He also seems to be some sort of devil-like figure, always showing up before children in need and ferrying them off to the Maw. He's also the one responsible for bringing Six to the Maw in the first place.
• In the first chapter of the comic book, one of the children tells his story about how he arrived in the Maw; The North Wind destroyed his hometown and he was forced to evacuate with his sister. When none of the nearby villages would take them in, they both took shelter in a barn while still being followed by the wind. Eventually, the North Wind tries to coax him out...To reveal his sister had been dead for a long, long time, impersonated by the Ferryman, who proceeds to whisk him away to the Maw in his despair.
• As Six opens a music box for the group and begins to play it, the other children are mesmerized, but one of them angrily breaks the box. The other children stare at her in confusion, but she explains that she's hated mirrors ever since she was changed into her current form by a mirror. She was part of a group of children who ventured into a house of mirrors that could make their dreams come true: one kid wishes to be strong and is given a muscular body, another kid wishes he was tall and his body is stretched and the last kid wishes he had a twin and is given a double. Unfortunately, this makes them all easy prey for the monster hiding in the mirrors as seen when it grabs the muscular kid. The girl undos the mirrors' effects by breaking them, but when she looks into her reflection in one of the broken mirrors, she became a hunchbacked deformity. The kids promise they'll come back with help, but they don't return. And at that moment, the Ferryman appears.
• Episode 2 of the Little Nightmares II comic has a toddler living in the woods run from his burrow after having a nightmare, but he accidentally runs into the Hunter's territory. Just as he's about to enter an outhouse where a strange sound is coming from, a TV turns on. It seems to hypnotize him as he smiles blissfully while the Thin Man reaches out for him.
  • While this world has no shortage of children in peril, there is something especially disturbing about a child young enough to still be in diapers being forced to survive on their own in a deadly forest. Even if Thin Man didn't grab him, it's doubtful that the toddler would have made it for very long.
• Episode 3 has a girl digging her way out of the hospital room she's in with nothing more than a spoon. How long has she been in there? Look at the tally marks on the wall. However, the worst part is the ending. After she digs her way out, she realizes she's been going in a circle. Then the door to her room opens and she runs out...unaware that the Doctor is crawling on the ceiling right above her.
  • This gets even worse if you consider that the Doctor may have been the one giving these spoons to the girl as a way to torment her with the chance of escape.
• Episode 4 features a fat boy hiding from the Bullies. His only weapon? A lollypop, which he uses to smash their heads. Then he hears a noise and hides in one of the lockers...only for the Teacher to find him as she stretches her neck out.
  • Throughout the entire comic, the fat boy carries an expression of utter horror with tears of fear streaming down his face. It's probably the most terrified that a child character has ever been depicted in this series, which makes his eventual capture all the more depressing.

DLC

• At one point in "The Depths", the Runaway Kid has to winch up a bag that's in the water with a nearby crank. Something, presumably the Granny, will try to hold it down, until eventually it slips free, but that's not what's scary. What's scary is that as it rises above the water, you can see a little human arm dangling out of a rip in the bag, clearly drowned.
• When the Granny actually catches the Runaway Kid, you can see him flailing around, either in pain or in an attempt to escape its grasp. Not only is this a fairly long death scene, but it ends with him resigning to his fate and just giving up. Oh god...
• In the final swimming chase segment of "The Depths", the Granny will twice leap out of the water to try and shake apart the high platform that the Runaway Kid is hiding from, letting you get a good look out of her.
• There's also the way you ultimately deal with the Granny: pushing in a live TV on top of her as she leaps about in the water, electrocuting her to death. Thank goodness for the game's use of Bloodless Carnage!
• The other runaway girl is never seen after you journey further down into the Maw. When you find what appears to be her flashlight, there's a Trail of Blood that leads to the boards with a bloody hand-print. When you squeeze past the boards, you see a large leech.
• The end of the Residence DLC, where The Lady stalks the poor runaway boy through a dark, dark series of rooms filled with mannequins, swishing in and out of view like she's toying with him—and then at the end, she captures him and turns him into a Nome.
• Many of the paintings in the Residence chapter show what appear to be former residents of the Maw, and all of them are as ugly and creepy as in the main game. Heck, the Lady sure isn't a looker either. There's also a painting displayed prominently in a secret room that depicts several anguished, fiery faces that appear to be melting together.
• The ending to the boy's story. After the boy gets turned into a Nome, anyone can put two and two together and then the realization comes crashing down horribly on the player. He then wanders down to the dining area where he stands by a sausage on the floor, where the player knows Six will eventually appear when she gets another hunger pain.
• If you stay past the credits, you see a TV flickering, and then the screen shows the blurry image of the Thin Man.
  • The end of II reveals that the Thin Man is Mono. Why has he suddenly appeared on the screen? It's implied he's coming after Six and is just one step behind her.

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