TheRetroArcade
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Posts: 1,967
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland is more daydream than nightmare.
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I was recently visiting friends who have young kids, and like every child on the planet in the year 2026 they love K-Pop Demon Hunters—or at least, most of it. The parents had to fast-forward past "the demon parts," since they were apparently a bit too scary for at least one member of the under-five crowd. Those kids might've died on the spot if they'd watched the cartoons that scarred me as a kid, including All Dogs Go to Heaven (which begins with a dog going to hell) and Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, which I remember virtually nothing about because I only watched half of it 30 years ago and it scared me shitless.
The 1989 animated movie has the honor of a write-up on the website Kindertrauma.com, which contains a number of evocative descriptions: Nemo gets "dropped like 5,000 feet into some insane vortex that turns into a tunnel where he almost gets run down by an evil choo-choo train" and there are "creepy, slimy looking, black, smoky-type nightmare monsters with the red eyes who flood out of evil looking doors in caves." This is emphatically not the tone of the new Little Nemo game, Guardians of Slumberland, released on Tuesday.
At least based on its opening couple hours, Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland is pure joy instead of sheer terror. As in the film, Nemo is a little boy who can go to sleep and scurry off to dreamland, and Slumberland is again in trouble: parts of it are disintegrating into oblivion, creating rippling, black hole-esque voids in the 2D levels. But Nemo is smiling. His head bobs with loving hand-drawn detail. Every bed he comes across is a welcome checkpoint, not an express bus to hell.
This game is beautiful in a style that platformers began toying with early in the "HD" era, reimagining the pixel art of Super Nintendo games as if they were instead illustrations come to life. Nintendo's Wario Land: Shake It! and Cuphead come to mind in particular, but it seems to me the novelty of this art style faded pretty quickly—it doesn't guarantee attention anymore. But for a game that pulled in only $80,000 on Kickstarter, Little Nemo is punc...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
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I was recently visiting friends who have young kids, and like every child on the planet in the year 2026 they love K-Pop Demon Hunters—or at least, most of it. The parents had to fast-forward past "the demon parts," since they were apparently a bit too scary for at least one member of the under-five crowd. Those kids might've died on the spot if they'd watched the cartoons that scarred me as a kid, including All Dogs Go to Heaven (which begins with a dog going to hell) and Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, which I remember virtually nothing about because I only watched half of it 30 years ago and it scared me shitless.
The 1989 animated movie has the honor of a write-up on the website Kindertrauma.com, which contains a number of evocative descriptions: Nemo gets "dropped like 5,000 feet into some insane vortex that turns into a tunnel where he almost gets run down by an evil choo-choo train" and there are "creepy, slimy looking, black, smoky-type nightmare monsters with the red eyes who flood out of evil looking doors in caves." This is emphatically not the tone of the new Little Nemo game, Guardians of Slumberland, released on Tuesday.
At least based on its opening couple hours, Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland is pure joy instead of sheer terror. As in the film, Nemo is a little boy who can go to sleep and scurry off to dreamland, and Slumberland is again in trouble: parts of it are disintegrating into oblivion, creating rippling, black hole-esque voids in the 2D levels. But Nemo is smiling. His head bobs with loving hand-drawn detail. Every bed he comes across is a welcome checkpoint, not an express bus to hell.
This game is beautiful in a style that platformers began toying with early in the "HD" era, reimagining the pixel art of Super Nintendo games as if they were instead illustrations come to life. Nintendo's Wario Land: Shake It! and Cuphead come to mind in particular, but it seems to me the novelty of this art style faded pretty quickly—it doesn't guarantee attention anymore. But for a game that pulled in only $80,000 on Kickstarter, Little Nemo is punc...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?