This place is too big for us.
Everything is oversized, as though we've stepped through the glass at the carnival's hall of mirrors. Doors aren't entryways, but mouths of caves. Each step on the staircase is a mini-mountain to scale. Later, when plastic aberrations shuffle in the darkness and you shatter the empty skulls of malevolent puppets with a hammer that's bigger than you are, you'll realise it's not just the world that's too big, but the risks, too. The horror. The dread. It's a bleak, broken place utterly bereft of love and compassion, but full of terrifying things – things that shouldn't exist, not now, not ever, not even in your most twisted nightmares.
When we first met Six, the tiny, solitary figure of Tarsier Studio's first Little Nightmares offering, her world echoed with the flat sounds of her lonely, wet footsteps. In this second instalment, however, she's accompanied by a partner, and it's this friend – nicknamed Mono, although you're never formally introduced – that you'll inhabit for this adventure. Nary a word is exchanged between them – occasionally they'll call softly to each other – but it's a partnership that feels extraordinary from the off, a friendship forged in fear and an unfaltering determination to survive.
