Hearts Of Darkness

After eight years working on LittleBigPlanet, Tarsier is exchanging dreams for nightmares.

- Ben Maxwell

Tarsier’s brightly coloured, playfully decorated premises are exactly what you’d expect the home of a studio that’s spent the past eight years working closely with Media Molecule, on its LittleBigPlanet series, to look like. A hotchpotch of lampshades and rugs, a familial collection of framed photos of the team, and a range of stately looking furniture – we’re given the rundown of which chairs are the most comfy during our tour – make the space feel welcoming and homely. There’s fresh fruit in the kitchen, naturally, and not a single employee appears to be wearing shoes. Underneath this small company’s friendly exterior, however, something darker has been fermenting, waiting for an opportunity to bubble to the surface.

That spectre has emerged in the form of Little Nightmares. Known as Hunger prior to Tarsier’s publishing deal with Bandai Namco, and a distant relation to the company’s unreleased first project, The City Of Metronome, the dark adventure evokes the surreal output of French directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, whose collaborative work includes The City Of The Lost Children and Delicatessen. The game casts players as Six, a vulnerable but capable child lost in the belly of an ocean-borne contraption called the Maw. Six’s bright-yellow raincoat seems to be the only surface in the place that doesn’t greedily swallow all of the light. Within the depths of this buoyant nightmare, terrible creatures lurk – or, perhaps, are employed – as boatloads of children are dropped off at the surface entrance, never to re-emerge.