Many of Little Nightmares II's best moments are structured like jokes: tense build-up released by a climactic surprise. As the player, you may want to play in this world, but Mono's clear motivation is to find a painless route to safety. Tarsier's imaginatively brooding art helps to sell this story. Though Little Nightmares 2 tells its story wordlessly, we can easily intuit Mono's goal: escape. His horrifying adventure takes him out of the woods and through a frightening cityscape haunted by humans who have turned into frightening parodies of mundane occupations, like a teacher whose watchful eyes dart at the end of a long, distended neck. From the moment we first meet Mono, alone in the woods, he is vulnerable. Lasting relief, however, is nowhere to be found on Mono's journey. I climbed onto the light, and used the impromptu step stool to hop the barrier, marveling at the way developer Tarsier Studios had cleverly used a colorful environmental detail as a hint for a puzzle-a joke where a sigh of relief greeted the punchline instead of laughter. Sure enough, the light fixture whooshed over my head, hit the barrier, and came to a halt. When I respawned, I set the pressure plate off again and crouched down.
"I wonder if I can." I thought, eyeing the nearby toy, ".duck." Once the checkpoint reset, I tried again, attempting to quickly run away from the floorboard before the pendulum fell. I turned to run just as a metal light fixture swung down from the ceiling, smashing me into the barrier and killing me. When I approached, the floorboard the duck was sitting on sunk into the floor. Behind it, there was an oaky barrier, formed from leaning one table against another-too tall for my character, a tiny child named Mono, to climb. A dim spotlight from somewhere above shone on its reflective wings. It was the kind of carved, wooden plaything that kids drag around on a piece of twine, with wheels where the real waterfowl's webbed feet would be. About an hour into Little Nightmares II, I found a toy duck resting on a hardwood floor.