I admit it, I downloaded the free prologue for horror I loved the Baby Blues Nightmares game because I couldn’t stop laughing at the offer to “utilize a toddler’s unique abilities,” which encompasses “stealth gameplay,” “survival elements,” and “upgradable skills.” It’s like a toddler is actually a little-known class of special operator from a Tom Clancy shooter, rather than a hyperactive, whiny ball of tears and poop. Then again, I imagine Sam Fisher was a toddler once. Maybe that’s how he started out: escaping a broken-down house filled with wandering demonic toys.
Fortunately, the game doesn't lean too heavily into the survival and stealth premise. The Steam Page When he talks about “upgradable abilities,” he means customizing your toy tricycle, which you can use to transport smaller, non-demonic toys around the house. When he talks about “survival items,” he means comforting yourself with collectible chocolate bars, so you don’t burst into tears and alert the monsters (there are also apples, which restore health but don’t make you stop crying – what a judgment on the modern Western lifestyle, eh!). And when he talks about “the unique abilities of a toddler,” he mostly means your size, which transforms the scruffy surroundings into a grotesque, ogre-like playground, with tables to crawl under and stools to move around as platforms.
Baby Blue Nightmares isn't the first game to do this. Between the dream sent us reeling through giant domestic games in 2014, and Little nightmares It does the same thing from a side-on perspective. But Baby Blue Nightmares has some interesting ideas of its own, like letting you draw on walls with crayons. This is cool in part because the game is “semi-open world” (you might want to mark doors and such to help you navigate and solve puzzles). But it’s also cool because I’ve been waiting for a game that lets me live the rapidly shortened life of a horror game’s non-playable character and cover every available surface with ranting graffiti and unexpectedly practical advice. Here’s one of my contributions from the prologue. Sorry about the low brightness; I had the gamma cranked up on the other monitor.
There’s a lot of this kind of play in Baby Blue Nightmares. You can play with toys you find, bounce rubber balls off the TV in the game room, even when Ominous Backstory is playing, and stomp on squeaky toys, even when they give away your position. You can drag and drop scissor-toothed teddy bears, Blumhouse-style, to form a tea party of scissor-toothed teddy bears, Blumhouse-style. I expect this element of whimsy to take precedence over stealth, which feels fairly rote and arguably annoying: you run from things and hide under other things until the first things move. The experience of inhabiting a small, squat body with no ability to dodge obviously creates some suspense, but the monster designs are familiar from any number of Dead Silence clones, and so far the game seems to be throwing them at you in a familiar way.
The child is arguably the biggest monster of all. As we learn in the opening cinematic, he prefers scary dolls to non-scary ones, and look, I don't trust a two-year-old who knows how to attach accessories to a tricycle; it goes against nature. There doesn't seem to be any adults tangibly present in the world, which seems a shame, because as everyone knows, one of the most important functions of children in horror stories is to traumatize their parents.
If Mom and Dad were still around in Baby Blue Nightmares, we could scare the shit out of them by giving them scary doodles of, oh, say, Sam Fisher again. Mr. Splinter doesn't like it when you laugh, Mom! He gets terribly angryand when Mr. Splinter gets angry, he does the splits over the kitchen door with his friend, Mrs. Karambits.
The full version of Baby Blue Nightmares will be released on September 16th. Download the prologue hereIt's the work of Steelkrill Studio, a solo developer with a soft spot for horror scenarios with a twist. The emptinesslesswhere it is necessary to use a LIDAR device to be able to see.
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