Little Nightmares 2 sees the series return with a vengeance. The horror puzzle-platformer brings all the beloved tension, bizarre character design, and uncomfortable eeriness from the original, only with a whole new premise and character to follow. You know. Little changes.

It’s easy to compare games in a series and find the similarities across the stories, but the differences expand the world in which Six experienced her terror. It becomes one that reaches outward and upward towards new themes, monsters, and little odds and ends, that all make this instalment unique. Seeing these differences can help players theorize on what directions the next instalment or DLC might take, and what horrors the developers might have in store for the future. Spoilers ahead, of course.

Updated August 4, 2022 by Dan Christmann: Terror never gets old. While Little Nightmares 2 may be the last installment in the series for some time, both it and the original continue to frighten with their minimalist approach to horror. Let’s be honest, that Janitor is going to be haunting your dreams forever, no matter how long ago the game was released

Now, with the release of Little Nightmares 2: Enhanced Edition, you can re-visit the game’s terrifyingly bleak world with a ton of new graphical upgrades. Did you like the game, but think that the room of flesh at the ending wasn’t realistic enough? Well, now you can experience it in all its disgusting glory, along with the Nome’s Attic DLC, which will let you collect a hat that’s far too whimsical for its own good.

13 There’s A New Protagonist

In Little Nightmares 2, you follow Mono, a little boy with a bag on his head and a fascination with televisions. He lacks any of the colorful notions associated with Six and her yellow raincoat, but his paper bag is memorable enough.

The choice to follow Mono rather than solely Six is one of the most obvious upon first opening the game. The developers might’ve chosen this to add something intriguing to the gameplay, but the role Mono plays in the ultimate story of the Broadcast earns him his starring role.

12 You Have Pockets

Playing as Six in Little Nightmares didn’t give you a lot of options for carrying things. You’ve got your lighter, but that’s about it. Everything else, you had to carry in your hands, even keys. This made for some tense moments, but mostly just made you wish that you’d worn pants with bigger pockets.

Mono, on the other hand, has pockets for days. He can attach certain items to his coat, like keys, and can even fit a flashlight in those roomy trousers. Sadly, many items are still situational, but Mono’s large storage capacity gives you a bit more breathing room when encountering the terrors of Little Nightmares 2.

11 You Can Fight Back

In Little Nightmares, you only had two options when facing an enemy: run, or hide. Like the Outlast or Amnesia series, your inability to fight upped the tension and gave you a feeling of helplessness necessary for any horror game.

Unlike Six, though, Mono has no qualms duking it out with some of the smaller enemies in Little Nightmares 2. There’s still nothing you can do against the adults of the world, but the clay-headed bullies had better watch out. Mono has got a hammer with their names on it.

10 You’re Not On A Boat!

The landscape of Little Nightmares 2 spans great distances across the course of the story. You trudge through swampy marshes to escape the Hunter, sneak around a decrepit school with the remnants of the previous inhabitants still lingering in drawings and corpses, and traverse the urban cityscape on the journey to the Broadcast Tower.

The seafaring Maw was just one location of note in the Little Nightmares lore, and in Little Nightmares, 2 players get a grander scope of the true depravity and danger of the world Mono and Six are trying to survive.

9 The Focus On Technology

Six’s journey focused on hunger, the gnawing kind that seemed unrelenting and completely controlling to both Six and the passengers of the Maw. Mono, however, shows no interest in eating rats he finds under a conspicuous lamp.

Instead, Mono and his surroundings are shaped by interactions with technology, seen earliest in this promotional material from the developers. Televisions serve as portals for Mono to travel through and as distractions for the enemies in areas like the urban cityscape. The Broadcast Tower emanates a hypnotic drone that enraptures the inhabitants of the land, causing many to die in an attempt to reach the source. Is this a commentary on the technological status of our world, or just a fun way to scare your pants off?

8 The Enemies Have New Motives

One of Six’s primary threats on the boat was being eaten by the monstrous patrons aboard the ship’s restaurants, kitchens, and elsewhere. While Roger (Mr. Long Arms) didn’t want to eat her, the theme of hunger in various forms throughout the game (for beauty, for actual food, for power, etc.) makes it a potential threat no matter where you are.

However, in the second game, the enemies aren’t chasing you to consume you. Most enemies Mono encounters are aggravated because he interrupted their routines of particularly nasty habits: building dolls, being soul-sucked by the Broadcast, playing jump rope, what have you. Are we less tasty now? Or are we running from something worse?

7 The Porcelain Children

Children aren’t seen alive much in Little Nightmares. Six and Mono are alive, but for the most part, we only see child-shaped lumps turned to stone by the gazing eye and some environmental storytelling that alludes to something happening to all of the children.

In come The Porcelain Children: deranged, seemingly mindless childlike dolls with oversized porcelain heads that Mono finds ripe for some smashing. What happened to the children of the school? And why are they all so breakable?

6 You Don’t Want To Escape

Rather than jumping, climbing, and scurrying your way through the underbelly of the boat to finally gain the strength to abandon the boat and all of its horrid passengers, Mono has a different directive. Mono is running towards something, towards the mysterious door he sees in his television adventures and the ominous broadcast entrapping everyone.

Six runs away, Mono runs towards. Both characters have dark ends to their stories, so maybe Little Nightmares is saying that it doesn’t matter how you approach the problem because the potential for darkness is omnipresent. Maybe we’ll learn more in the next installment if there ever is one.

5 Hats!

Collectibles are some of the most sought-after achievements for completionists out there. In the first game, you were tasked with destroying idols and hugging little gnomish humanoids.

4 You Get A Partner In Crime

Little Nightmares had a solitary gameplay experience and Little Nightmares 2 changed that up. Mono finds an abandoned little girl, later revealed to be Six when you find her signature raincoat, and suddenly the lone Mono has a friend.

This friendship allows the player to leap huge gaps, climb otherwise unscalable surfaces, and have another character to emotionally attach to. Also, did we mention you get to hold hands if you want? It’s the little things, you know?

3 There’s No Handheld Light Source

One of the major accessories to Six’s character in the first game is her lighter. She maneuvers small spaces and lights oil lamps as a sort of environmental checkpoint for the player.

Little Nightmares 2 doesn’t have a controllable light source for the player, or at least not a consistent one. Instead, Mono gets a range of handheld items to wield throughout the game including an ax, a hammer, and a flashlight.

2 New Big Baddies

With every new game comes new antagonists to fear. Lucky for us, we get some pretty spooky ones this time around, like the Teacher and the Thin Man. The Teacher is a cranky old woman with a neck that extends like wet clay to spy on unruly children like Mono and Six. She chases you through air vents by overextending her neck and chomping at you with her teeth.

But she’s not the biggest of the bad guys you face in the game. The Thin Man, controller of the Broadcast Tower, appears through televisions and snatches people to take into the television dimension with him. Six is one of his victims, thus forcing Mono to face whatever lies behind the Broadcast Tower door.

1 It Doesn’t End Well

The ending of Little Nightmares was fairly nice. Sure, Six eats a couple of people, but everything turns out alright in the end. Six gets to leave the Maw, the people who want to kill you are dead, and you’re left with only a vague suspicion that you’ve just unleashed a monster upon the world.

Mono’s ending, though, is a lot bleaker than that. Instead of accomplishing what he set out to do, he’s trapped in the ruins of the Black Tower. He slowly transforms into the Thin Man, warped by the power of the television broadcasts. It’s unclear whether or not he’s the same Thin Man that you must defeat earlier in the game, which would mean that Mono is trapped in a time paradox, desperately trying to defeat his former self. But even if that’s not true, turning into an evil monstrosity isn’t exactly what you’d call a happy ending.

NEXT: Likable Characters Who Turn Out To Be The Bad Guy