I’ll admit that I downloaded the free horror prologue to Baby Blues Nightmares mainly because I couldn’t stop giggling at the offer to “utilize the unique abilities of a toddler,” which includes “stealth,” “survival elements,” and “upgradable abilities.” It’s like a toddler is an underrated special operator class from a Tom Clancy shooter, instead of a whining, hyperactive ball of tears and poop. Then again, I imagine Sam Fisher was once a toddler. Maybe that’s how he started: escaping a broken-down house full of wandering demon toys.
Fortunately, the game is not as focused on stealth and survival as Steam page suggests. When we talk about “upgradable abilities,” we’re talking about honing a toy trike that you can apply to transport smaller, non-demonic toys around the house. When we talk about “survival elements,” we’re talking about soothing yourself with collectible chocolate bars so you don’t burst into tears and alert the monsters (there are also apples that restore health, but don’t stop you from crying—what a judgment on contemporary Western life, eh?). And when we talk about “special toddler abilities,” we’re mostly talking about your size, which turns a lifeless environment into a grotesque, ogre-like playground, with tables to crawl on and stools to play with for platforming purposes.
Baby Blue Nightmares isn’t the first game to do this—Among the Sleep sent us staggering through gargantuan home appliances in 2014, and Little Nightmares does the same from a side-scrolling perspective. But Baby Blue Nightmares has some neat ideas, not least of all letting you draw on walls with crayons. This is clever in part because the game is “semi-open world”—you might want to mark doors and the like to make it easier to navigate and solve puzzles. But it’s also frosty because I’ve been waiting for a game that let me relive the quickly abbreviated lives of horror-game NPCs and cover every available surface with livid graffiti and unexpectedly practical advice. Here’s one of my contributions from the prologue. Apologies for the destitute brightness—I had gamma turned on on my second monitor.
There’s a lot of that fun to be had in Baby Blue Nightmares. You can play with toys you find, bounce rubber balls off the playroom TV even as Ominous Backstory flies at you, and stomp on squeaky toys even as they give away your position. You can drag and drop scissor-toothed Blumhousey bears to create a scissor-toothed Blumhousey bear tea party. I hope that this fantasy element outweighs the stealth elements, which feel fairly routine and potentially annoying – running away from things and hiding under others until the first one moves. The experience of inhabiting a miniature, chubby body with no way to dodge it certainly creates some tension, but the monster designs are familiar from many Dead Silence clones, and so far the game seems to throw them at you in a familiar way.
The toddler is probably the biggest monster of them all. As you learn from the opening scene, he prefers scary dolls to non-scary ones, and look, I just don’t trust a two-year-old who knows how to accessorize a tricycle – it’s against nature. There don’t seem to be any adults in the world, which seems a shame because, as everyone knows, one of the most vital functions of children in horror stories is to traumatize their parents.
If Mom and Dad were still in Baby Blue Nightmares, we could scare them by giving them macabre drawings of, say, Sam Fisher again. Mr. Splinter doesn’t like it when you laugh, Mom! He gets terribly lividand when Mr. Splinter gets mad, he does the splits over the kitchen door with his friend Mrs. Karambits.
Baby Blue Nightmares full version will be released on September 16th – download the prologue here. It’s the work of Steelkrill, a lone developer with a supple spot for horror with a twist Without emptinesswhere it can be seen with a LIDAR device.
