I’ll admit, I downloaded the free prologue for the horror game Baby Blues Nightmares mostly because I couldn’t stop giggling at the offer to “use a toddler’s unique abilities,” which included “stealth gameplay,” “survival elements,” and “upgradeable abilities.” It’s as if a toddler were some under-recognized special operator class in a Tom Clancy’s shooter game rather than a whiny, hyperactive ball of tears and poop. Still, I imagine Sam Fisher was once a toddler. Maybe that’s how he got his start: escaping from a dilapidated house full of wandering demon toys.
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Thankfully, the game doesn't lean as heavily on the stealth survival premise as its Steam page suggests. When it mentions “upgradeable abilities,” it's referring to outfitting your toy tricycle, which you can use to transport smaller, non-evil toys around the house for purposes currently unknown. When it mentions “survival elements,” it's referring to comforting yourself with collectible chocolates so you don't burst into tears and alert monsters (there are also apples that restore health but don't stop you from crying — what a huge disregard for modern Western lifestyles, huh). And when it mentions “the unique abilities of a toddler,” it's mostly referring to your size, which turns the environment into a grotesquely large playground, with tables you can climb under and play stools you can pull up for platforming purposes.
Baby Blue Nightmares isn't the first game to do this – Among The Sleep dragged us staggering between giant household objects back in 2014, and Little Nightmares does the same from a side-on perspective. But Baby Blue Nightmares has some neat ideas of its own, most notably the fact that it lets you draw on walls with crayons. This is handy in part because the game is “semi-open world” – you might want to mark doors and the like to help you navigate and solve puzzles. But it's also great because I was expecting a game that let me live out the rapidly restricted life of a horror game NPC, covering every available surface with profane graffiti and unexpectedly practical advice. Here's one of my contributions from the prologue. Apologies for the low brightness – the gamma was up on the other monitor.
There’s a lot of that playfulness in Baby Blue Nightmares. You can run around with toys you find, bounce rubber balls off the playroom TV, and even step on squeaky toys as they blare out Ominous Backstory at you, even if they give away your location. You can create a scissor-toothed, Blumhousey teddy bear tea party by dragging and dropping scissor-toothed, Blumhousey teddy bears. I expect this element of quirkiness to take precedence over the rather routine and potentially frustrating stealth work – you’re dodging things and hiding under other things until the first thing moves. The experience of inhabiting a small, chubby body with zero dodge-rolling ability clearly provides some tension, but the monster designs are familiar from many Dead Silence clones, and so far the game seems to be throwing them at you in a familiar way.
The little boy is probably the biggest monster of all. As you 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 accessorize a tricycle – that's against Nature. There don't seem to be any tangible adults in the world, which is a shame because, as everyone knows, one of the primary functions of children in horror stories is to traumatize their parents.
If mom and dad were still there at Baby Blue Nightmares, we could scare them by giving them scary doodles, say Sam Fisher again. Mr. Splinter doesn't like it when you laugh, Mom! terribly crazyand when Mr. Splinter gets angry, he does push-ups on top of the kitchen door with his friend Miss Karambits.
Baby Blue Nightmares' full release is out on September 16 – download the prologue here . It's the work of Steelkrill Studio, a solo developer with a penchant for horror installations who've done something different – take The Voidless, where you have to use a LIDAR device to see it.