Somehow a movie that gave me nightmares as a kid has been turned into the delightful Metroidvania palate cleanser I needed after Silksong

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 punching far, far above its weight class.

It's not the first time—Hollow Knight, famously, was an incredibly modest 2014 Kickstarter, earning even less. Both are beautiful games, but Nemo is deliberately softer and more rounded than Hollow Knight—more bubble letters than Helvetica. The little boy jogs along unhurriedly, and despite only having three hit points (on the harder of two difficulties), Slumberland feels far less threatening than Hallownest. Autosaves preserve every accomplishment. You lose all the candy you've collected if you die ("get woken up"), but there's a character collecting your lost riches somewhere, and there are no Dark Souls-style runbacks.

Nemo's chunky geometry and abilities, like plucking plants from the ground to fling at enemies, feel more directly rooted in decades-old platformers than Hollow Knight ever did. But it looks so damn nice and has such a joyous soundtrack I found myself getting sucked in far more quickly than I expected.

Prior to the recent ubiquity of the phrase "it's got the juice" more or less meaning "good," the word "juice" had a specific meaning in game design—the small flourishes of bouncy animation or reaction that make a game just feel good. The menu sound effect in Final Fantasy is pure, undiluted juice. Capcom's Street Fighter 3: Third Strike spritework? Hand-squeezed, with extra pulp.

It's clear just from the title menu that the indie team behind Little Nemo worshipped at the altar of juice.

Tonally, Guardians of Slumberland likely has more in common with the original Winsor McCay Nemo comics than the 1989 movie that traumatized me. It's light and whimsical, but filtered through the minds of game designers who went to sleep dreaming of Duck Tales and Mega Man. The first boss I fought, a giant octopus, hinted that the full game won't be nearly as easy as the first hour of baby mode platforming, but the stakes are low—trying again is quick, and the accessibility options are generous.

I didn't finish Hollow Knight: Silksong last year. As much as I admired the attention to detail, I just wasn't in the mood to push past its most punishing bosses. I'm sure I'll go back to it someday. But after years of anticipation, it just didn't grab me the way Hollow Knight did years ago. Nemo, by contrast, is thrilled for me to fill in every inch of its bubblegum fantasy map. It's a truly delightful change of pace for a genre that's more and more defined by difficult combat and precision platforming.

Those games are great, but these days my real dreams are stressful enough.