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I’ll admit it, I downloaded the free prologue for horror game Baby Blues Nightmares mostly because I couldn’t stop giggling at the offer to “utilize the unique abilities of a toddler”, encompassing “stealth gameplay”, “survival elements” and “upgradeable abilities”. It’s as though a toddler were actually an undersung class of special operator from a Tom Clancy shooter, rather than a wailing, hyperactive ball of tears and poop. Then again, I imagine Sam Fisher was a toddler once. Perhaps this is how he got started: escaping a smashed-up house full of roaming demon toys.
Fortunately, the game doesn’t lean into the stealth-survival premise as much as the Steam page suggests. When it talks about “upgradeable abilities” it means tricking out your toy tricycle, which you can use to ferry smaller, non-demonic toys around the house. When it talks about “survival elements”, it’s talking about soothing 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 judgement upon modern Western lifestyles, eh). And when it talks about “the unique abilities of a toddler”, it’s mostly referring to your size, which transforms the dowdy setting into a grotesque, ogreish playground, with tables to crawl under and playstools to yank around for platforming purposes.
Baby Blue Nightmares isn’t the first game to do this – Among The Sleep sent us tottering among gargantuan domestic fixtures back in 2014, and Little Nightmares does the same from a side-on perspective. But Baby Blue Nightmares does have some nice ideas of its own, not least letting you draw on walls using crayons. This is nifty partly because the game is “semi-open world” – you might want to mark up doors and the like to help you navigate and solve puzzles. But it’s also cool because I have been waiting for a game that lets me live the swiftly curtailed life of a horror game NPC and cover every available surface with ranty graffiti and unexpectedly practical advice. Here’s one of my contributions from the prologue. Sorry about the low brightness – I had the gamma turned up on the other monitor.
There’s a lot of this playfulness in Baby Blue Nightmares. You can fanny around with the toys you find, bouncing rubber balls off the playroom TV, even as it blares Ominous Backstory at you, and stamping on the squeaky toys, even as they give away your position. You can drag and drop scissor-toothed, Blumhousey teddy bears to form a scissor-toothed, Blumhousey teddy bear’s tea party. I’m hoping this element of whimsy will take priority over the stealth stuff, which feels quite routine, and possibly grating – you run away from things and hide under other things until the first things move on. The experience of inhabiting a small, pudgy body with zero dodge-roll capability obviously creates some suspense, but the monster designs are familiar from any number of Dead Silence clones, and so far, the game seems to hurl them at you in a familiar way.
The toddler is possibly the biggest monster of all. As you learn in the opening cinematic, he favours scary dolls over non-scary ones, and look, I just don’t trust a two-year-old who knows how to accessorise a tricycle – it goes against Nature. There don’t appear to be any grown-ups tangibly present in the world, which seems a shame, because as everybody knows, one of the most important functions of children in horror stories is traumatising their parents.
If mum and dad were still about in Baby Blue Nightmares, we could scare the hell out of them by handing over ghastly doodles of, oh, let’s say Sam Fisher again. Mr Splinter doesn’t like it when you laugh, Mommy! He gets awful mad, and when Mr Splinter gets mad, he does the splits over the kitchen door with his friend, Mrs Karambits.
The full version of Baby Blue Nightmares is out on 16th September – download the prologue here. It’s the work of Steelkrill Studio, a solo developer who has a thing for horror setups with a twist – take The Voidless, in which you must use a LIDAR device to see.