Nightmare Fuel / Little Nightmares II

Sadist Teacher taken up to eleven!

If the last game and the title didn't already tip you off, this game is not for the faint of heart. You thought The Maw was bad?

The Pale City will make you want to go back.

WARNING: Nightmare Fuel pages on TV Tropes have a Spoilers Off policy. All spoilers below will be unmarked. You have been warned!

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General

• Like the first game, the graphics invoke all kinds of Uncanny Valley, and the heightened violence doesn't help.
• The state of the Pale City in general, a desolate place where buildings are falling apart, people are twisted mentally and physically, and just about every big establishment you explore is run by a complete and total psycho. Have fun...
  • When you first arrive at the city, if you look closely at the crumbling buildings, you’ll notice some of them are bending. Not crumbling but bending, almost as if they were made of rubber. A sign of the Signal Tower’s distortion perhaps…
  • Adding to the above, most who played the first game might be under the impression that, given how hard Six tries to escape, the world beyond the Maw must be better somehow. Nope, the horrors of the Pale City make even the worst of the Maw look tame. If the first game made you think the Lady went too far in staying away from the outside world (living at the bottom at the ocean for the vast majority of the year and all the things she did to keep the Maw running), this game will make you believe she didn't go far enough.
• The Glitching Remains. The main collectibles of the game, they are static imprints left by the unfortunate children that came before you, heavily implied to have been taken by the Thin Man, based on how Six seems to leave one when she is taken during Chapter Four.
  • A comic makes it even worse, showing us some of these children's fates. Let that sink in. There were so many actual children fighting for a better life. Not only Six, the Runaway Kid and Mono. And each and every one of them is now just...gone.
• In the first game, one of the only completely safe spaces were the vents and small spaces of the Maw, but in this game...not so much. Here are some examples:
  • In the first chapter, you escape from the Hunter the first time by ducking into an animal-made tunnel. Think you’re safe and catch your breath near the hole you entered it through? He will shove the barrel of his gun down the hole and fire, most likely killing you.
  • The Teacher’s example is the most prominent of the three, when at the climax of the chapter, you start to escape through a vent, but catch her attention. She proceeds to force her bulbous head into the vent in pursuit, sporting a Slasher Smile and biting at you.
  • The Restless Hand in the Hospital, which up until this point only travelled on the floor, pursues you up a shelf and into the vents, eventually forcing you out while it continues scuttling through, eventually ambushing you just as you find something that can put you on equal footing.
• So to say, if the first game actually gave the player a chance to win in the stealth segments, not letting the Chefs reach for you when you're under the table for example, the second game is nowhere as merciful. Particular "bosses" like the Teacher and the Doctor will NOT lose sight of Mono once he's spotted. Ever.

Chapter One

• The forest Mono traverses through at the beginning is haunting in atmosphere alone, with traps and dead bodies littering the place. And no, we don't mean dead animals, we mean dead humans...Maybe...
• The Hunter’s shack is filthy and unkempt, with a kitchen filled with flies around a revolting looking stew, and a group of people having been turned into an unsettling taxidermy display.
• The Hunter is full of this, with his face covered by a burlap sack with a single hole cut out, possibly hinting that, given the hole's placement on the sack, his face might be just as deformed as the rest of the monsters around him.
  • He's also almost explicitly a serial killer, hunting and killing adults, children, and even other monsters like him if his room of his catches are anything to go by. Unlike the Chefs from the Maw, who at the very least had the excuse that it was a part of their job, The Hunter has no actual justification; Mono and Six are both running through the woods, far away from his cabin. He does it for fun.
  • How utterly relentless he proves to be closely examining the mires and fields his prey lurk through, and on two separate occasions preforms a Barrier-Busting Blow through a wall and door, respectively.
  • The Hunter's introduction is utterly horrifying. You can vaguely hear him working in his shack even from all the way in the house. Then you make your way into said shack, and see him in the middle of a taxidermy, as seen in this◊ image. The lighting makes it look like something out of a horror film from the 1980's, but at least Jason Voorhees didn't have a shotgun. His work is pretty loud, allowing the duo to sneak past him...until he hears them pry a door open and gives chase.

Chapter Two

• Beware the Teacher whenever she's around. Or else if she does hear you, she'll stretch her neck out complete with all the uncomfortable sounds you can expect to search for Mono and grab him in her mouth.
  • Her sequence in the library is a great example of this. She lurks in the background, shambling through the halls, until Mono accidentally knocks over a few books. She goes quiet, but doesn’t attack. Then, as you jump to the next platform, her head bursts through a shelf, violently screeching as she bites at you. This leads into her closely examining a circular bookshelf in search of you, as you can see in this◊ image.
• The bullies are this. Cruel, murderous little who-knows-whats with porcelain heads resembling children. Even though they have the most "strict" teacher ever possible. It's stated they don't deserve kindness because they themselves don't possess such quality. It looks like they only exist to be this - a cruel, mindless force of chaos which won't just stop on its own.
  • The cafeteria section is creepy, even though kinda hilarious. You can see the bullies having so much fun without the Teacher around - chasing, punching, pushing each other and Mono if he'll come too close. A girl bully is even trying to drown her lovely friend in a pot.
• A rare moment that can occur when the Teacher catches you while she's "teaching" her class and you're sneaking by her is that instead of chasing you herself, the Teacher will sic the bullies on you instead while she watches. And you can't escape them like you could with the Teacher, they will catch you.
  • You actually can, if you run into the closet and climb the shelf to get the key like you're supposed to after she sends the bullies after you, the cabinet will fall and crush them flat, which gets you an achievement, after that the teacher will look in and, if she doesn't notice you, leave you alone, assuming the cabinet crushed you and the bullies and not caring about it, which is a different kind of horror once you think about it.
• Through the chapter, it becomes increasingly clear just how severely the Teacher is willing to punish her students. When Mono makes a cabinet fall, her first instinct after not finding anyone responsible is to start slamming down her ruler one each of her student’s desks. Then, you can see her shadow from below you as she disciplines one of her students, punctuated by the Bully yelping from each blow. There are several Bullies forced to write down eye symbols endlessly and, most glaringly, a hidden room in a staff-only area with a chair and bindings, and a nearby dead Bully.
• When the Teacher discovers you walking above her head while she plays the piano, you can crawl through a vent, and assume that, like all the other enemies, she'll get distracted by something else. Nope, instead, she shoves her head and neck through the vent and chases you down, with her mouth wide open and the intent to bite you to death. Even worse, her neck seems to go on forever, so she barely slows down. In this scene, her face looks more animated and fleshy than it ever has before, as her head looked like an expressionless wooden doll up to the final chase.
  • Just before this, you need to lower a pathway for you and Six, which means sneaking past her as she plays. Making a noise means she turns her head around without moving her body.
• After Six has been kidnapped, hung upside down by the bullies, and saved by Mono they come upon another bully in a different area drawing on the floor. As Mono can quietly try to approach the nearby hammer, Six will sneak up on the unsuspecting bully. Before Mono can get the weapon, Six will launch herself at the bully, put him in a chokehold, and audibly snap his neck. Six then stands over the broken bully she had just killed almost similar to the first game after she killed the Lady.
• There's a stealth bit where Mono is traversing some rafters above the Teacher who seems to be whacking a student with her ruler. Mono can't move on the rafters without knocking some objects off, causing the Teacher stretch her neck up to look around. Even managing to hide from her line of sight isn't too comforting, as the player gets a good close look at the Teacher's lovely face.
  • We never see who or what she was hitting down there, but the fact that we never hear anything else making noise down there aside from her doesn't help.
  • Speaking of the Teacher, her introduction. You first see her shadow in a hallway, but you can't quite tell what it is until you get closer...and then you see that that weird long shadow is her neck. She quickly shuts the door before noticing you, thankfully, but damn...
• In the school science lab, you have to sneak past the Teacher preparing for a lesson. She is seen stuffing frogs into a jar and what seems to be a real heart into a real torso to make a grotesque anatomy model, and Mono has to sneak right past her as she does all this. Eventually, she moves onto writing on a chalkboard, her back to Mono, but if she hears him, she will turn her head around to look for any disturbances.

Chapter Three

• The Hospital is surely a fun place on its own with creepy deformed half-mannequin "patients" charging at Mono, or with a humongous sadistic ceiling-climbing creature being in charge. But there are specifically more weird and dark moments here and there.
  • A strange room with what appears to be an actual dead body in a tub. It's wrapped into what appear to be tentacles or leeches and appears to be rotting. You can barely hear anything because of all the flies buzzing in the room, probably feasting on its flesh. Ew.
  • A room with an electric chair. Gives out some hints that the place is more of an Asylum rather than an actual hospital.
• The one-on-one encounter with the Restless Hand, starting when it rips itself free from a mannequin and scuttles off into the background. It swiftly proves itself a Super-Persistent Predator, hunting you on the ground, and when that fails, climbing up a shelf and through the vents in pursuit of Mono, all the while sporting an instant kill attack if it latches onto you. You can only imagine how delightful it is having to face two at once.
• Traveling through the Patients' ward of the hospital is terrifying. All throughout the hospital, you've seen these mannequins of flesh mixed with plastic and prosthetic parts, some of which are headless, some bandaged, and some with fragments of faces or sets of teeth suspended in place by wire. You're waiting anxiously every time you see one for one to just come to life already, and then you enter the left wing of the hospital and get stuck in a room where a Patient is blocking the doorway to the next room. Flip a light switch, and the light starts to slowly flicker, during which the Patient shudders to life with fluid motion each time the light goes dark. The light eventually fizzles out completely, the Patient enters full motion and starts to rapidly run at you with hollow plastic footsteps, and you realize with horror exactly why you've been given a flashlight in this chapter. From that point, you have to go through several rooms with the Patients, one dark with only your flashlight to keep three back long enough, one where you need to turn off the lights to get one out of a wheelchair, and another huge dark room with Patients all around where finding a route and using your flashlight correctly can be very difficult. Each time you get out of one of their rooms, their arms reach into the one you escaped to, and the last time, they don't stop moving and grasping.
  • Word of God says the patients went to the hospital willingly to let the doctor experiment on them. Why? For a change of pace…
  • Running down a hallway as dozens of mannequin arms shoot out of locked steel doors is tense, but having half a Patient burst out of one of those doors and be just as fast as if it had its legs is heart-pounding. The fact that it's crawling makes the table you run under no safe zone, and there are crawling Patients that will come to life ahead of you, too.
  • Having to let a Patient get up from a wheelchair wouldn’t seem scary as you know exactly what to expect, but the fact it doesn’t immediately get up, and it does so suddenly and with a scare chord can catch a player off-guard the first time.
  • After the room with the first moving Patient, there's a gurney with a limbless Patient torso on it. Climb up and the torso jolts to life for a few moments.
• After retrieving the first battery needed to power the elevator in the hospital, you enter a room where Six is playing with a mannequin arm. That alone isn't scary, but as soon as you enter, Six sllloooowwwwlllly turns in your direction, with a slow crackling noise.
  • Probably not even playing, but more like breaking mannequin's fingers rather sadistically. The crackling noise was coming from the severed bodypart - and Six clearly enjoyed what she was doing.
• The Doctor is basically a giant fleshy caterpillar, hanging from the ceiling with unnatural dexterity for his weight and size. He spends most of his level hunting Mono and Six down, and, guessing from the state of the "patients", is planning to do god knows what.
  • The Doctor, being on the ceiling, has a harder time noticing you hidden under him. Any hint of security this may give you is ripped away when you realize if any noise is made, or worse, he actually spots you, he can and will lift up any nearby cover, making avoiding him that much harder.
  • It also doesn't help that whenever he moves around, you hear a thunderous shaking sound that makes your blood run cold. Whenever you make a loud enough noise, he can hear it, even from another room.
  • Even just the noise he makes is unsettling, having a high-pitched voice that constantly sounds like he is giggling and crying at the same time.
• After trapping the Doctor in a crematory oven, Mono has the option to turn it on before getting into the elevator. How does Six respond to the Doctor screaming as he's burned alive? Sit down and warm herself in front of the fire. Worse still, this scene was used as a Christmas promo on Twitter!
• The Doctor himself is actually quite unnerving in that nothing is explained on how he's able to function. He crawls across the ceiling, of course, but theres absolutely no indication of how hes actually doing it, as if gravity is pulling him upwards endlessly, and he is capable of standing if he wants (as shown in a trailer and concept art). He's not even trapped like that either, as he attempts to crush you and gets inside his cremation oven right side up.

Chapter Four

• At the beginning of the chapter, we get our first encounter with a Viewer when one suddenly crashes down from the ceiling of the building you enter, before charging into the next room and ramming into a TV, which thankfully kills him. Unfortunately, from then on you will encounter them in droves, and if they are distracted from the static of the TV and/or notice you, they’ll emit a screech and a light from their faces will kill Mono. Speaking of their faces, they're either wrinkled and featureless, or caved in with holes.
  • The final sequence with the Viewers sees Mono shatter a TV that is being watched by several of them through a display window. They proceed to force themselves into the abandoned store Mono is in, toppling shelves as they shamble after him like zombies.
• At one point, you can find a package and a small mail slot in the same room. While normally nothing happens when you use either, if you have the postman’s cap equipped and take the package to the door, the hands of an unseen monster opens the slot, takes the parcel from you, and quickly shuts it again.
• The duo's first encounter with the Thin Man himself. While venturing through the Viewer-infested streets, Mono jacks into the Transmission yet again and finally opens the door he's been attempting to reach all this time... And there, sitting quietly behind it, is the master of the Signal Tower, and he is very clearly not pleased with being disturbed. Mono and Six get knocked out of the Transmission just like the previous times... But then something else starts to come out of the television, and suddenly the Thin Man is right in front of our two protagonists, walking towards his prey with no manner of urgency in his stride — there's nowhere for them to run, after all...
• The Thin Man is terrifying in his own right, despite being relatively plain in comparison to the other monsters. He has no monstrous features or anything too outwardly ghastly about him, and aside from his grey skin color, he looks nearly indistinguishable from a regular man. However, his unnatural twitching, slow intimidating walk, and the way that he seems to distort reality all dunk him straight into the Uncanny Valley.
  • The Reveal that he may well be Mono from an alternate timeline makes this both Nightmare Fuel and Tear Jerker. All those instances where he seems like he's going to attack you might be a cry for help.
• How you beat the Thin Man is equally intense. You face him down in a raining Main Road of the Pale City. He begins reaching out for you and Mono begins using his tv tuning abilities to literally tune him out of existence. Afterwards he somehow wills the signal tower to move close to him so he can enter, apparently destroying multiple buildings along the way.

Chapter Five

• The Signal Tower. For the love of all that is holy, anyone who reaches this point in the game had best take a moment to mentally prepare themselves for the horror that awaits inside the Signal Tower! The inside of the tower is this bizarre realm where space itself seems to be distorted and random objects are floating as if in zero gravity. Doorways glowing the same mauve light as the beacon on top of the tower seem to warp all over the place. As Mono navigates the tower, this eerie music box melody plays and he has to follow it to find Six.
• Eventually Mono finds the music box sitting in the middle of a room filled with toys but when he walks in the door, he finds someone there waiting for him. A Humanoid Abomination wearing a familiar yellow raincoat...
  • When you first strike Monster!Six’s music box it causes her to launch into an unstoppable rage, chasing you through the slowly collapsing tower, ending with Mono hiding while she completely destroys the room searching for us.
  • The Tower’s true form! As Mono works to save Six from the Tower’s influence the place begins to change into something more...organic. Walls of concrete and wooden floors give way to pulsating walls of flesh and eyes until it’s revealed the true form of the tower is this building sized biomass! At least with the Maw and the Nest, those were just a massive ship and a run down mansion occupied by monsters. Here? The location is the monster!
  • A somewhat subtle moment occurs when the music box is struck for the second and third time. Mono is taken to a pitch-black room that has nothing in it besides a single door with an axe sticking out of it. If you run past it, trying to see what else is in the area, the door will appear again. No matter which direction you go or how far you run, it keeps appearing, leaving you wondering if it really is endless or if you are running in circles. This is also true when Mono is stuck in the organic depths of the Tower, as the chair will always appear until Mono walks up to it.
• After saving Six from her monstrous form, the Black Tower starts to collapse and the two of them make their escape. Suddenly, the floor collapses and Mono jumps and grabs Six by the hand. And...she lets him go so she can leave by herself. All alone, Mono finds a chair in the center of a room and takes a seat on it. Then, he begins to grow older, taller and thinner...his skin turns dark...his clothes turn black...a fedora hat appears on his head...the door with the eye on it closes and we find ourselves looking at the hallway we saw at the beginning of the game.
• Then there's the secret ending: Six escapes the TV World, Shadow Six appears in front of her, and you're eventually treated to a familiar sound if you played the first game: a stomach growling. Six is STARVING. So essentially, even IF Mono escaped with her, he'd almost certainly die from being devoured by someone he trusted.
  • It also hints that this is a prequel when we see a flyer advertising the Maw, which Shadow Six points to as if showing Six a place where she can get rid of her hunger, which we know is anything but.

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