Katie Garrett (Independent researcher)

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Abstract

This paper conducts a “too-close reading” (Miller, Ruberg) of the indie horror game Little Nightmares II (2021) to consider how – through its narrative and formalist aesthetics, as well as surrounding paratext – queer readings of gender and horror linger beneath the surface. Structured around Jan-Noël Thon’s framework (2019) for analysing indie game aesthetics, and informed by literature on abjection (Kristeva), constructions of monstrosity (Halberstam), and queer video game studies (Shaw and Ruberg), this paper investigates: 1) how collaboration-focused mechanics and audiovisual aesthetics afford queer readings of these characters and the gameworld, 2) in what ways normative gender construction can be obscured and disrupted through character design, and 3) in what ways paratext surrounding the Little Nightmares series has limited queer readings and reinforced heteronormative interpretations of the game’s implicit narrative.

 

1. Introduction

Little Nightmares II (2021) is a puzzle-platform horror game developed by Tarsier Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. As in the first Little Nightmares (2017), you play as a small ‘child’ stuck in the Nowhere: a distorted and sinister world that you quickly discover is “built for others” (Priestman, 2017), namely towering ‘adults’ modelled after archetypal childhood fears (Priestman, 2017). A steely headmistress chases disobedient children down school halls using her endlessly stretching neck (Little Nightmares II, 2021), and Twin Chefs feed intruding children to the guests of a cruise liner (Little Nightmares, 2017). Gameplay revolves around players using their height to their advantage and finding alternate paths to survive encounters with antagonists in each themed chapter (the Hunter in an old cabin, the Teacher in a school, and so on) (2021).

In the first Little Nightmares you play as Six, a small child in a yellow raincoat who must escape from the Maw — the aforementioned cruise liner — before succumbing to the same cannibalistic urges as the guests aboard or turning into their dinner (2017). While according to Tarsier, the first game relied on “hide and seek” mechanics (Takagi, 2021), Little Nightmares II — which acts as a narrative prequel, although they can be played in any order — introduces limited combat mechanics and more complex puzzle sequences. Now you play as Mono, who wakes up in the woods and must venture to the Pale City (2021), where transmissions from a nearby Signal Tower have corrupted the City and its residents. Empty clothes from vanished residents hang through nooses, and the faces of those who remain are contorted into a spiral of flesh as they stare into the nearest screen. Six reappears as a non-playable buddy character, and together Six and Mono must, as stated on the Little Nightmares II physical box, “make your way to the dreadful signal tower and escape a world that’s rotten from the inside”.

Such narrative direction remains implicit within the game itself. Little Nightmares II has no dialogue or narration, and has sparse pop-ups solely to indicate mechanical controls. The names of characters and environments are only available through paratext such as Bandai Namco’s website or interviews with Tarsier’s developers; Mono, for example, is not named on physical copies of Little Nightmares II. Tarsier Studios has stated that, throughout development, they intended to craft a “visual narrative” for both Little Nightmares games (Crecente, 2021) and actively considered “the layers that people could dig into” within design decisions (Cork, 2017). And while this has been embraced by players, who have speculated about the ‘meanings’ of both Little Nightmares games since launch, there is a staggering amount of queer meaning lying just beneath the surface of Little Nightmares II, in both its narrative and formalist elements, which has gone completely unaddressed in players’ searches for ‘meaning’.

Analysing Little Nightmares II using queer theory reveals key tensions surrounding constructions of gender and monstrosity which structure the tall/small binary at the root of the series’ horror, and reveals how the game’s ludic aesthetics reflect queer experiences. Yet rather than enabling broad, queer interpretations of Little Nightmares, the ambiguity of its narrative has led to a broad reinforcement of normative constructions of gender and monstrosity among players. I will be conducting a close reading of Little Nightmares II to showcase the potential for queer interpretation inherent to the game and to consider the limits of Tarsier Studios’ design intentionality in enabling non-normative player interpretations.

 

2. Methodology

In “Imagining Queer Game Studies”, Adrienne Shaw and Bonnie Ruberg (2017) explore the disruptive potential of engaging with video games using “queerness as an ethos”  (p. x). They describe ‘queering’ – analysing video games through queer theory and queer experiences – as a political approach to video game studies through which we can restructure our interactions with games entirely and challenge “dominant assumptions about how video games should be studied, critiqued, made, and played” (p. x). In Video Games Have Always Been Queer (2019), Ruberg asserts that queerness is inherent to video games, as both “make space within structures of power for resistance through play” (1). Analysing games using queer frameworks, Ruberg argues, can “identify the queerness that already exists within video games, yet often remains just below the surface” (21), especially in games without explicit LGBTQ+ characters. Beyond representations, queerness can also be uncovered in a game’s “interactive system [and] their controls” (14).

In this paper I am queering Little Nightmares II precisely to unearth the queer lingering just below the surface. I will conduct this analysis using D.A. Miller’s methodology of the “too-close viewer” (2013, p. 23), since elaborated on by Bonnie Ruberg (2019), which illuminates queerness through connotation. By looking too close, one hones in on the meaning within narrative and formalist techniques that can be easily dismissed by a lack of proof — by the statement, in Miller’s (1990) words, “But isn’t it just…?” (p. 118) — but which, in lacking ‘proof’, open the floodgates to “recruit every signifier of the text” in service of connotative meaning (p. 120). Ruberg (2019) continues that, by being historically “forcibly closeted”, queer meaning bubbles up under the surface to explicitly “‘irritate’ the norm” (p. 57). Without explicit proof or denial, then, connotative queer readings become infinitely “probable” (p. 67).

Through a too-close reading of Little Nightmares II, I will hone in on the connotative meaning communicated through formalist aesthetics. I will conduct this reading with reference to the aesthetic categories outlined by Jan-Noël Thon in “Playing with Fear: The Aesthetics of Horror in Recent Indie Games” (2019).¹ Thon expands on work from Jesper Juul and Maria Garda and Paweł Grabarczyk to present three categories through which to analyse games: audiovisual aesthetics (visuals, perspectives, sound design), ludic aesthetics (“possibilities of interaction” and mechanics), and narrative aesthetics (narrators, narrative techniques, and access to “characters’ subjectivity”) (pp. 197-198). I will pair my textual analysis with paratext — developer interviews, fanwikis, fan discussions, and concept art — to also consider the intentionality of Tarsier’s ambiguous depictions of gender.

Despite the resounding popularity of the Little Nightmares series — selling 20 million total copies prior to Little Nightmares III’s release² — it has been sparsely analysed, even more so through a queer lens. I have chosen to limit my analysis to Little Nightmares II as I believe its single-player co-op mechanics and more expansive narrative present a productive starting point for queer analysis (compared to Little Nightmares 1’s shorter, single protagonist experience). I aim to unearth alternative forms of meaning left unacknowledged in most interpretations of Little Nightmares II and to consider how the potential for queer readings of this implicit narrative have buckled under the weight of heteronormative approaches to play.

 

3. The Hunter: Abjection, Collaboration, and Intentionality

Tarsier Studios describes the Little Nightmares series as chronicling children’s journeys through a horrifying world (n.d.), and Little Nightmares II’s Steam page describes a conflict between “enormous, implacable adults” and Mono and Six, the “little ones” (2021). While a player learns almost immediately that the environment is antagonistic toward Mono and Six, the violence you experience is not rooted in this unspoken divide between adults and children. Rather the sense of scale separating the tiny Mono and Six from the towering Hunter, illustrated by the game’s audiovisual and ludic aesthetics, is what generates horror (Tarsier Studios, 2021). The emphasis placed on this unspoken child/adult divide in paratext and fan discussions, despite never being stated in-game, welcomes a too-close reading of what lies beneath and the ways that queerness protrudes through more minute details.

The game begins with the player-as-Mono waking up alone in a forest, with Tarsier’s use of a “dollhouse perspective” (Priestman, 2017) emphasising the differences in scale between you and your exaggerated, eerie surroundings. Reeds and wild grass tower above you, and any slight ledge is a tall cliff you must puzzle out to proceed. When dozens of tiny bear traps lie between you and the next platform, you must use enormous abandoned shoes to set them off and clear the path. The game’s audiovisual and ludic aesthetics are shaped by a sense of trespassing generated by the palpable differences between the player and the gameworld. When Mono reaches the Hunter’s cabin at the edge of the woods, for example, his yard is covered in small cages. Mono’s steps are near-inaudible as you inspect the house — but after hearing the heavy footsteps of the Hunter from rooms away, you immediately feel cornered.

These aesthetics indicate that the gameworld is actively antagonistic toward Mono and Six. You are required to navigate it through unconventional means, using paths which, to the Hunter, would seem “illegitimate, closeted, or hidden” (Ruberg, 2019, p. 82) but are vital for Mono and Six’s survival. Such aesthetic decisions are brimming with queer potential, a potential reinforced by Tarsier’s stated intention to craft a world “so ‘other’ … that you feel it in your bones, that it was built for others, and that you simply don’t belong there” (Priestman, 2017). Tarsier Studios narrative designer Dave Mervik has stated that the “exaggeration” (2017) of the Little Nightmares art style was key to communicating this sense of ‘otherness’ within the gameworld without words. Thus if a ledge is out of reach, you climb through a badger hole; while running from the Hunter, Mono and Six hide in shallow swamp waters that the Hunter would never think to search. These alternatives physically position the player outside of the norm, and they do so through an explicit association with the abject Other: dirt, death, non-human nature, and a turn away from individualism.

This constructed Otherness recalls Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection (1982), where she describes the abject as a “twisted braid of affects and thoughts” perpetually threatening the collapse of the ‘norm’, or the contained, clean, individual, bordered ‘self’ (p. 1). The corpse is abject, as is bodily waste, and so the abject must be – as Barbara Creed (1993) describes in her analysis – “deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self” (p. 11). While assembling a definition of abjection centered around queer studies, Robert Phillips (2014) argues that the abject “renders problematic any assumption regarding the fixity of the borders separating subjects from objects and self from other” (p. 20), and Creed (1993) recognises that monstrosity in film is often “produced at the border which separates those who take up their proper gender roles from those who do not” (p.13). The Hunter engages with Mono and Six, his abject “prey” (Bandai Namco, 2021), through what Creed (1993) describes as the normative cyclical relation with the abject: a continual process of confrontation with and exclusion of the abject, as “that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life” (p. 11).

The Hunter places miniature traps and cages across the forest in order to catch, kill, and skin his victims — a process through which he reaffirms normative constructions of gender and expels the abject. Yet the Hunter dies by the very tools he uses to expel the abject, and through an explicitly abject act: Mono and Six collaborate as one self to hold up the Hunter’s shotgun and kill him. While the player-as-Six must escape from the Maw alone in Little Nightmares (2017), the ludic aesthetics of Little Nightmares II are defined by collaboration. This is a dual-protagonist game, described by Max Dyckhoff (2015) as one where a playable character is accompanied by a (mostly) non-playable character who provides aid (431). The player relies on Six at every turn, unable to progress without Six’s help in turning cranks, leaping across gaps, and jumping on floorboards until they break. This positions Mono and Six as one “composite” body (Kristeva, 1982, p.4) reliant not on individualism but multiplicity to survive.

Also notable is a mechanic allowing you to hold Six’s hand at any point. This is not required for progression, as Six generally follows your path and assists with puzzles after using Mono’s ‘call’ mechanic. It is particularly interesting since Six is a non-playable character: they are not what Creed (1993) calls a “discrete entity” (p. 53) fully separate from Mono, but instead embody Kristeva’s (1982) figure of the abject “double” (p. 207). Through their presence, Six continues Mono’s existence. Anyone who has played Little Nightmares I has also been Six before (2017), and so Six is dually separate and composite. To hold hands with Six and find comfort in this choice becomes a queer act, an embrace of the abject through multiplicity.

The queer potential of such ludic aesthetics is enhanced due to Mono and Six’s character designs. Six is ambiguously gendered throughout the Little Nightmares series; their signature design is a yellow raincoat with a hood covering their face (2017). Though they lack this coat at the beginning of Little Nightmares II while held captive by the Hunter, their face is covered by a long black fringe (2021). You unlock the “True Colours” achievement when Six retrieves their coat later in the game — an achievement linked to a phrase describing one’s “real nature or character” (Merriam-Webster). On the surface, this references Six’s return to their signature design from Little Nightmares I. However, it also indicates that Six is their most ‘real’ self when their appearance is hidden, and particularly when they cannot be read through simple gender categorisations.

This idea that Six is themselves when ambiguously gendered has stretched back through the development of both Little Nightmares games. Included in the “TV Edition” collector’s bundle for Little Nightmares II is a book of concept art which showcases the intentional ambiguity of Mono and Six’s designs (Winterfalls13, 2025). In action-based concepts, such as Mono and Six escaping the Hunter, the two are depicted only as shadowy figures — yet are always holding hands (see figure 4). Six remains ambiguous in all concept art, with their face turned away and hidden by their hood and hair (Little Nightmares Wiki, 2021). Mono’s face, however, appears in multiple pieces. In one notable piece, Mono and Six sit together on a long metro bench. Mono stares toward the viewer, their pale face fully exposed; while Six also stares straight ahead, they lack any facial components, their head now a clean, featureless sphere (see figure 5). Refusing categorisation from developers or any viewer, Six’s “real nature” (Merriam-Webster) is centred around ambiguity and a refusal to be categorised.

Little Nightmares II’s ambiguous depictions of gender, and the narrative interpretations they afford, have been mostly overlooked in player interpretations. This is due to one paratextual detail: both Bandai Namco and Tarsier Studios have consistently referred to Mono and Six as a “boy” and “girl” while discussing Little Nightmares II (Bandai Namco, 2021; Priestman, 2017). This is despite Tarsier’s stated desire to maintain Six’s gender ambiguity since before Little Nightmares’ release. Mervik has stated that he personally chose Six’s name early in development because it lacks gendered associations (Cork, 2017), saying, “the most important thing about Six is that she’s a kid. It’s not about whether she’s a girl or a boy”. Yet despite hoping that “there’s no importance about gender” regarding Six (Cork, 2017), Mervik genders Six in the same sentence.

It is clear that Tarsier Studios intentionally designed the Little Nightmares series to be open to broad interpretations — and therefore broad queer readings — yet it is important to move beyond a focus on intentionality due to the issues this moment highlights. Queerness exists in video games independent of developer intentions, and in the case of Little Nightmares II, in spite of them. Many heteronormative players on fan forums have insisted on categorising Six and Mono (but especially Six) along binary gendered lines. Their ‘proof’ is often that “The official site refers to [Six] as a girl and the devs [sic] always use she/her for six [sic]” (Piefihi, 2022), and many have suggested that the fanbase itself cemented the Little Nightmares series as ‘straight’ through their influence on Tarsier Studios: “the fandom kind of adopted her as female so the devs [sic] just went with that” (Piefihi, 2022). One of the few explicitly queer readings of Six on the Little Nightmares Reddit page features a nonbinary player cosplaying as Six for pride month, covering their face with an LGBTQ+ flag (_itz_Amy_, 2021). In the replies, multiple players insist that Six is not nonbinary and cite Bandai Namco’s website as ‘proof’ against this reading.

In these moments, the importance of looking too closely at Little Nightmares II becomes clear. As Ruberg (2019) argues, queering games considered ‘straight’ is crucial to demonstrate the queer meaning inherent in any gaming experience (p. 1). For Little Nightmares II in particular, the game’s implicit narrative — one largely debated and speculated about by players — can be uniquely clarified through a queer lens. A queer reading unveils new understandings of the Little Nightmares world which heteronormative play has obscured, and so the following section will too-closely read those elements of the Teacher and Six’s characters brimming with queer meaning that the limits of intentionality and a reliance on ‘proof’ have “forcibly closeted” (Ruberg, 2019, p. 57).

 

4. The Teacher And ‘Monster’ Six: Gender And “Sewing Jobs”

In “Getting Too Close: Portal, ‘Anal Rope,’ and the Perils of Queer Interpretation”, Bonnie Ruberg (2019) conducts a too-close reading of Valve’s Portal (2007) to indicate “the counterhegemonic potential of getting ‘too close’ to games” (p. 57). Ruberg queerly reads the game’s representations of gender which, as a game considered a “cherished classic” (p. 73), have been rejected by many players. They analyse an “at times overtly erotic” relationship between the player-character and the game’s narrator GlaDOS (p. 73), both femmes, and Ruberg concludes their analysis by asserting queer game studies’ role to “challenge the hegemony of what is deemed reasonable and comfortable by getting too close for comfort” (p. 83).

Little Nightmares II, similarly to Portal, is a “critical darling” (Handrahan, 2021), particularly beloved due to its utilisation of atmospheric horror. The IP has spawned a broader franchise of comic books, mobile games, and a potential TV adaptation (Freeman, 2017; Kit, 2017). Yet such levels of exposure, combined with its implicit narrative, have resulted in paratextual sources being incorporated into the experience of playing both Little Nightmares games and therefore influencing readings of their inherent queer potential. Case in point: when a player on the Little Nightmares II Steam Community page stated that they saw Mono and Six as “nameless / faceless children” — and considered them both “male” — another player insisted that Six’s gender is ‘confirmed’ by “the [Steam] store description, trading cards” (NoOneYet, 2021). But focusing solely on the game itself reveals abundant queer meaning bubbling beneath the surface. I will now conduct a too-close reading of the character designs of the Teacher and Six, specifically the moments in which their character designs shift, to consider how destabilised gender categories define Little Nightmares II as a whole.

The Teacher is the second antagonist of Little Nightmares II, an abusive boarding school headmistress who believes that “children should be seen and not heard” (Bandai Namco, 2021). She is modelled after a traditional “strict teacher” in a button-up shirt, long skirt and Mary Jane shoes. Her insulated schooling system lies in stark contrast to the wider Pale City. Outside, the Signal Tower at the heart of the Pale City has left it in ruin. The Thin Man — a long-limbed, normatively masculine figure in a suit and fedora — lives within the Tower’s transmission. Using televisions as teleportation tools, he reaches through the screens scattered on every corner to consume the life force of the City’s population. At the School, in contrast, there are cubbies for shoes and gendered uniforms for pupils who remain intensely focused on their books in class.

This normative façade crumbles as the player arrives. As you try to pass the school on your way to the Signal Tower, you must retrieve a key for the upper floors by sneaking through a classroom. You use the pupils’ desks as cover while the Teacher alternates between writing on the blackboard and staring down at her pupils, searching for bad behaviour. When detected by the Teacher, she reveals her defining characteristic: her endlessly elongating neck, with which she chases after the source of trouble, consumes it, and returns both the school environment and herself to ‘normal’. As Jack Halberstam (1995) describes, the Teacher here engages in a “sewing job” (p. 176) — stitching a skin for herself which obscures ‘monstrosity’ under an archetype of femininity.

In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Halberstam (1995) explores shifting cultural constructions of monstrosity in Gothic novels and films from the nineteenth century to the present day. He traces various historical constructions of monstrosity – from that of a “foreign body” (p. 13) in nineteenth century literature, which embodies all threats to “gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality” (p. 21), to more contemporary monsters defined by “proximity to humans” and the “inability to ‘tell’” – to argue that monsters “always represents the disruption of categories” (23). I will primarily draw from Halberstam’s analysis of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (pp. 138-160) and The Silence of the Lambs (pp. 161-177) – in which he explores “inadequately gendered bodies”. and the ways skin and surfaces are markers of both gender and humanity (p. 141) – to consider how the Teacher’s design and mechanics make strange the possibility of reading gender and even humanity through the skin.

Halberstam (1995), elaborating on Judith Butler’s work in Bodies That Matter, explores how “inadequately gendered bodies represent the limits of the human” – and how such bodies are identified, and determined to be (in)human or (im)properly gendered, at the level of the skin (p. 141). A core element of horror, he says, is “dismantling the stable relations between representation and reality” (p. 145). “Improper gender”, then, which cannot be determined at the level of the skin, makes strange what any representation could mean (p. 165). It arises when the external cannot suggest the internal and so skin-level disturbances, like “shredding, ripping, or tearing”, become a liberating force which disrupts “identity performance” (p. 141).

The Teacher demonstrates a particularly strict adherence to ‘proper gender’ at a surface level, which reaches its limits along with the limits of her control as evidenced by her shifting character design (Tarsier, 2021). She has constructed an internal world apart from the Pale City, where overall control is tied to her control over ‘proper’ gender representation. At the skin level she embodies archetypal femininity, and commits corporal punishment on her students – known collectively as the Bullies due to their aggressive behaviour toward Mono and Six – to maintain both her position and gender construction. The player finds Bullies in isolation rooms and with ropes around their necks, forced to complete repetitive punishments. But when Mono and Six arrive, and begin exploring the School in non-normative ways as one composite body, the illusion of her separation from the Pale City dissolves. Her elongated neck counteracts her loss of stability; she stretches her normative skin to its limits, overriding her perfectly-crafted representation with a hidden, abject reality to regain control. The Teacher mostly hides this stretching from the Bullies. Only the presence of Mono and Six — two evasive, ungendered bodies — can cause her to reveal the “monstrous instability of surface” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 151).

For the Bullies, too, the skin is a performance of gender enforced by the Teacher. The Bullies are made from porcelain; if the player attacks them with metal tools, their heads loudly shatter into multiple pieces. Likely as a result of the Teacher’s abuse, many of the Bullies that the player interacts with have heads that are already broken in half (see figure 8). For these pupils, their gender is represented by their school uniforms: the girls wear skirts and blouses while the boys wear knee-length shorts with waistcoats. Interestingly, however, the Teacher’s desire to maintain normative constructions of gender through the Bullies is what causes their eventual collapse. She abuses the Bullies to maintain control over them, which damages their heads and turns them into half-dead bodies in gendered costumes. When faced with Mono and Six, then, her stringent construction of femininity collapses, transforming to reveal an uncanny, stretched reality.

Mono and Six are characters whose surfaces similarly stretch, morph, and confuse the stability of skin-level representation. In particular, Six’s shifting character design, which defines the game’s climactic moments, disrupts the binary organising principle of Little Nightmares as a series: the divide between tall antagonists and small protagonists, which represents the divide between monstrosity and humanity. But Six and Mono transform in opposing ways: while Six is met with vitriol among many players for the ways their skin does not fit, Mono represents an alignment with normative perceptions of ‘proper gender’ and falls victim to the oppressive rigidity of such a binary.

The climax of Little Nightmares II revolves around saving Six from the Signal Tower, who is captured by the Thin Man. At this point the ludic aesthetics shift away from collaboration toward focusing on Mono’s burgeoning ability to ‘tune’ the Tower’s transmission. After Six’s capture, you use televisions — much like the Thin Man — to teleport through the Pale City, helping you to bridge impossible gaps where Six previously lent a hand. When the player reaches the Signal Tower, Mono has defeated the Thin Man, and removed their hat to bare their face for the first time. But in the Tower, Six is different — they have been made strange. They tower over Mono; their arms are so long that, in order to fit within the confines of the room, they have three zig-zagging elbows. Where they previously navigated the gameworld almost silently, their breathing is now loud and laboured, and their steps rattle the floorboards.

In this moment Six is aligned with the antagonists you have defeated, particularly the Hunter, whose heavy steps alerted you to his presence in the game’s first chapter. This partly explains many players’ colloquial nickname for Six in this sequence: Monster Six (Skrappoo, 2023). But despite such readings of monstrosity, Six remains themselves: they wear their yellow raincoat and their hair still falls over their face (see figure 10; Tarsier, 2021). ‘Monster’ Six works even harder to maintain their ambiguity, keeping their eyes on the floor and their head firmly tilted down. And unlike the other antagonists, ‘Monster’ Six does not pursue control of an environment through individualistic violence. Where the Hunter sought to kill all Others in his path, and the Teacher maintained a tight grip on gender representations through abuse, ‘Monster’ Six solely focuses on a wind-up music box. When the player calls out to them, Six follows Mono’s voice without apprehension or fear. Only when Mono approaches Six with violent intent – to progress, the player must equip a hammer and try to destroy Six’s music box – does Six attack.

Here, Little Nightmares II questions the one binary that has structured its aesthetics: the divide between ‘tall’ and ‘small’, implying the divide between ‘monster’ and ‘human’. Six is still Six in this sequence, only their “skin is precisely what does not fit” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 163). This skin does not align with our understanding of how Six should look – nor, more importantly, does it evidence the meaning we have embedded it with. Six is a familiar face and collaborator in a fight for survival. ‘Monster’ Six, on the other hand, too closely represents the very antagonists that the player has fought against (Tarsier, 2021). Six never seems uncomfortable or trapped in this ‘monstrous’ skin – but they have become the very monster Mono feared, and so the player’s impulse is to expel the monster, redraw the binary, and enforce the norm through violent exclusion. ‘Monster’ Six’s transformation — which in many ways does not change them at all — demonstrates that the categorisations of humanity that structure Little Nightmares are inherently unstable.

In this moment, the game recalls its first chapter, where Mono rescues Six from captivity in the Hunter’s basement. Would players have rescued a version of Six – unfamiliar at that point, playing with their music box, without their recognisable yellow raincoat – whose skin seemed a little too different, too inhuman? The answer is obvious. ‘Monster’ Six represents “the inability to categorize” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 23) that defines constructions of monstrosity. Breaking down the game’s ultimate binary, Six’s representation forces players to question their actions throughout the game and just how much they relied on surface-level recognition to anticipate monstrosity.

In the game’s final moments, you destroy Six’s music box and return them to their past, ‘human’ representation. The Signal Tower starts to crumble around you, its walls oozing with eyeballs and flesh. While escaping with Six, Mono needs their help to cross a gap in their path, and Six jumps across the crumbling platform to offer a hand. But when Mono jumps and takes Six’s hand, they hesitate, then lets go — running to freedom as Mono falls into the fleshy core of the Signal Tower. Alone in the collapsed Tower, Mono sits upon an empty chair. You watch them grow longer and taller over time, transforming into the Thin Man.

The moment in which Six drops Mono is the source of much fan speculation, with many players debating whether Six is inherently evil. Some suggest that Six was hiding a “dark personality” all along (Daviddv1202, 2021), and cite other game events — Six warming their hands on the Doctor’s cremated body, or being violent toward the Bullies (Tarsier, 2021) — as evidence that Six is “the true villain of Little Nightmares [sic]” (Daviddv1202, 2021). Others argue against such readings, claiming that Six “lost [their] ability to feel positive emotions” in the Signal Tower (Yoshibrine28, 2022). A common theory suggests that Six recognised the Thin Man’s face in Mono’s after seeing it clearly for the first time (Protector_of_Humans, 2025); another states that Six could not forgive Mono for destroying their only form of “escapism” in the Nowhere, their music box (Mr-Plague, 2021).

Such theories, I argue, work to ‘straighten out’ the layers of ambiguity at work within Little Nightmares II and all operate from the basis that ‘Monster’ Six’s existence is inherently wrong. They assume that Six dislikes their ‘monster’ form; it is a given that Six needs to be ‘saved’ from it, and so Six drops Mono “out of spite” (Ace_Wash, 2021) for destroying their music box or because they are a traumatised child making “irrational decisions” (Steam_SpectralE, 2021). These interpretations fall short; through a queer lens, the game’s conclusion instead depicts a nonbinary character resisting the binaries of gender and monstrosity which Mono seeks to enforce. Six’s obscured face both in-game and in concept art becomes an site of resistance which celebrates “inadequately gendered bodies” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 141) while Mono — still partially indebted to concepts of ‘proper gender’ — sees ‘Monster’ Six as a source of horror.

Thus Mono transforms into the Thin Man, a strictly masculine archetype. This shift recalls the Teacher’s “sewing job” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 176) and how her representation of gender, while inherently unstable, relied on a complete sense of control. Mono attempts to exert such control on Six, determining which of their representations is strictly human, and falls victim to the restriction of explicit gender categories. Six, all the while, remains ambiguous, not just ungendered but unconcerned with the binary between human and monster that Mono enforces. They resist the “violence of naming” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 160) as Mono perpetuates and falls victim to it – finally becoming the object of their own violence and the very figure, throughout Little Nightmares II, that they fought against.

4. CONCLUSION

In Little Nightmares II, Tarsier Studios presents a deviant world brimming with queer meaning. Despite the developers’ intentional ambiguity with regards to Little Nightmares, a lacking dedication to such ambiguity outside of the gameworld has only served to reinvigorate many players’ search for, as D.A. Miller (1990) describes, a heteronormative “desire for proof” (p. 123). This has obscured the game’s queer potential and limited players’ possibilities for interpreting the game, as potential sites for queer analysis have been overshadowed by the use of gendered pronouns for Six or diminishing discussions of Six’s ambiguity between the releases of Little Nightmares I and II. This paper has demonstrated the abundance of queer meaning that exists within Little Nightmares II once one recognises the inherent instability of pronoun use and gender categorisation as a whole – a search which reveals most of the characters, environments, and mechanics to operate “in the service of queerness” (Ruberg, 2019, p. 82) if only one digs deeper than details consigned to paratext.

End notes

1. An indie (independent) video game is, broadly, one “financed independently, published independently, and developed with a high degree of creative independence” (Thon, 2019, p. 197). Tarsier Studios, the development studio behind the Little Nightmares franchise, fits comfortably within this definition: the Swedish studio, founded in 2005, has primarily operated as a “work-for-hire studio” on game development for larger publishing companies such as Sony Entertainment (Embracer Group, 2019). Tarsier’s first original title was 2017’s Little Nightmares, which was developed in-house but published by Bandai Namco (Bandai Namco, 2021).

2. This paper will not discuss Little Nightmares III, released in October 2025. Bandai Namco owns the Little Nightmares IP, and Tarsier Studios was acquired by Embracer Group during the production of Little Nightmares II in 2019 (Embracer Group, 2022), meaning that Tarsier Studios could not continue with the IP. The third installment was developed solely by Supermassive Games (Until Dawn (2015), The Quarry (2022)), and so the development of the third game does not follow in the chronology of the first two, which were produced broadly by the same team.

 

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Ludography

Little Nightmares, Tarsier Studios, Sweden, 2017.

Little Nightmares II, Tarsier Studios, Sweden, 2021.

Portal, Valve, US, 2007.

 

Authors’ Info

Katie Garrett
Independent researcher
katie.garrett94@gmail.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.