We went hands on with Bandai Namco's Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes on PlayStation VR2 at GDC 2026. How is it? Read on.
If you're not familiar with the Little Nightmares franchise, it is a series of puzzle-based platform horror games played in third person. Altered Echoes bridges off the stories of the first two games. Without getting too deep into spoilers, Altered Echoes stars Dark Six, the dark corrupted version of Six, who starred in the first game and is a prominent part of the second. As it was explained to me, Dark Six is on a journey to reunite with Six.
The demo was played on a PlayStation VR2 in a first person view. One thing pointed out to me right away was a silhouette of Six/Dark Six's signature hood present in the field of view while playing. It doubles as both added immersion and a lore-friendly way to help newer users with motion sickness via a makeshift vignette. The demo was also in snap turn only. I didn't have time to check the options to see if I could disable it as I only had thirty minutes to play the demo.
I started in a deserted train station and right away the sense of scale stood out. In keeping with the franchise continuity, everything around you is larger than you. A simple row of chairs or a stack of suitcases becomes a near insurmountable mountain. Altered Echoes gets this right away. I spent the first few minutes in awe of how I, a 6 foot tall husky guy, felt so small in this world. Immersion? Check.
This early stretch was a simple matter of calling and then boarding a train. First few rooms were simple enough. Find a switch or repair a fuse to power up the station and open the next door. Pretty basic stuff. The level design is what stands out here. Not just the aforementioned sense of scale, but between the security cameras' lights turning from green to red and following me if I was in line of sight, a light use of fog, and the eerie lack of music making every sound (like a door shutting behind me) shudder-inducing, I was tentative with every move. Atmosphere? Check.
After navigating a death trap of a moving maze, I boarded the train and the real horror kicked in. The train was filled with sleeping adult passengers. Disrupting their slumber by bumping into one of them or breaking one of the dinner plates woke them up and summoned the Conductor: a grotesque worm like creature patrolling the cabin cars. Here Dark Six has to simply get from one end of the cabin to the other without being caught by the conductor. It's stealth horror at its finest. Get spotted and go back to the start to try again. My time ran out shortly after this just as I made it to the kitchen car adjacent to a dining room with several hungry looking patrons. If you are not familiar with the franchise, hungry adults in Little Nightmares is a bad thing.
Overall, this demo was terrific. Visually, the game looked great in the PS VR2. The closest adjacent experience I have played in VR is Out Of Sight, which similarly plays with world scale and would be a good primer to check out before Little Nightmares drops next month.
Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is scheduled for release on April 24. The game can be wishlisted now on Quest, PS VR2, and Steam.
