and Roger and Little Nightmares Understand Feeling Small Is More Than Just Being Small

By Wallace Truesdale | October 6, 2025 | 1:00pm

Video Games Features let's get small

and Roger and Little Nightmares Understand Feeling Small Is More Than Just Being Small

At the risk of making someone giggle, there’s something I must state plainly: size matters on most days. Sometimes it matters in small ways, like being too short to reach the top shelf at a grocery store, or having arms that aren’t long enough to reach a stray remote behind the couch. Then, there are the big ways that size matters. It is the Earth’s size that gives it a gravity that won’t let us go. It is an ant’s size that allows people to crush them without effort or thought. It is a child’s size that makes you grab their hand out of fear that you could lose them to a crowd, if not losing them to the embarrassment that a child often feels as they get older. Size matters, and that is partially why feeling small can be such a damning sensation.

Smallness is more than a physical consideration. For all the tiny but mighty stories out there, the emotions and mindset are often associated with a sense of powerlessness and alienation. Many games know how to make players look small with enemies the size of skyscrapers and airships that blot out the sun, but less focus on emulating the mentality. It’s for this reason that when I think about games that make me truly feel small, both the recently released and Roger and 2017’s Little Nightmares come to mind. While focused on significantly different subject matter, the ways in which they force players to interact with the worlds they create and hide create a similar effect that doesn’t just shrink me on the screen, but also in my mind.

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and Roger’s successful emulation of smallness starts with its unique presentation. The first chapter tells much of its story effectively through windows, except these windows aren’t surrounded by decorated walls or natural greenery but pitch-black darkness. From the get-go, the game creates a space that makes you aware you’re missing something that is consistently just out of reach. Even when it’s not using this window framing, and Roger is still positioning people and things in such a way where they are cut off. You’re seeing drooped shoulders without the head. You’re dodging swiveling heads detached from their bodies. And much of it, if not all, is massively disorienting to the protagonist Sofia. The space and the strange man inhabiting it are foreign to her, despite how familiar everything else is with our confused protagonist.

This alienating factor is bolstered by how much and Roger starves the player of information. Anyone who has read a few reviews or passing comments about the game may notice how people tend to dodge sharing what and Roger is tackling, and while I’m also in the camp of encouraging people to experience this game with minimal information, the truth is the game also doesn’t share that much. All conclusions about what the game is about won’t be born from definitive answers it shares, but filling in gaps and making educated guesses. This is an element that Little Nightmares also shares characteristically, except it goes even further than and Roger since at least the latter has dialogue. Little Nightmares throws you into the Maw without a word. This lack of communication from both games even extends to controls, as neither immediately tells you how to navigate the challenges it presents you. You have to fiddle with the control, see if left still means left or suddenly means up, without the usual hand-holding to move forward. Even at their most talkative, these games require that players grasp for context clues to proceed.

I was initially tempted to label these similar approaches as ways of capturing the scary side of child-like wonder, but I’ve landed more on children being the best vehicle to understand smallness. After all, outside of children’s teeny tiny sizes, half the conversations adults seem to have when children are involved focus on how to not involve children in something. From the onslaught of online age verification to the adult table at Thanksgiving, much of societal living has become about alienating kids. Regardless of intention, adults constantly censor themselves around children and hide large swathes of the world from the munchkins—which means children are constantly kept ignorant and forced to connect the dots themselves. It’s that persistent vagueness throughout childhood that makes everything seem bigger, and children smaller in turn.

With that said, it is ultimately how these games carry the other adults that makes me push back on centering children instead of smallness. Little Nightmares ends by making its protagonist Six big—not by growing her in size, but by knocking down the mysterious woman who plagued Six’s mind since the game’s start. Despite being the enemy, it was horrific watching Six take the woman down. While the visual of Six eating her face certainly doesn’t help, what left a bad taste in my mouth is that the act of becoming big required making someone else feel small. It’s a moment that hammers home that, even if physical size never changes, feeling big or small is all about what shadows you find yourself in.

and Roger takes a less grotesque, but equally impactful route towards making that same point. There are several moments where Roger signals deep frustration at the situation he and his wife are in. Dealing with what could be called caregiver fatigue, Roger breaks frequently against the wall of sickness’ apathy. He cries, gets dismissive, collapses from overwhelm, and even does something that he rightfully sees as reprehensible. Despite the power he holds in the dynamic explored, or how easy it is for the player to feel small in comparison to Roger during certain segments, it doesn’t take long to see how much Roger is folding underneath his relationship’s reality. The thing towering over Roger is invisible but real all the same, alienating him from the familiar and promising a future of uncertainty.

Ultimately, both these games ensure that you understand anyone can feel small when faced with something big enough, literal or otherwise. Physical size does matter, but and Roger and Little Nightmares reveal how catering to the emotions and feelings around size can be equally impactful.

Wallace Truesdale is a journalist and critic who loves games and much of what they come into contact with. He’s written for Unwinnable, Stop Caring, PopMatters, and more. You can usually find him blogging at his site Exalclaw, hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch, or devouring some cookies.