COLOGNE, Germany—When you're a child, everything is terrifying. Shadows under the bed hide monsters, the light peeking through the window creating a world of stark whites and blacks. Tarsier Studios' Little Nightmares (formally known as Hunger) brings you straight back to this world, filling you with that inflated sense of wonder and horror only a child can feel. It's impressive stuff.

Boil it down and Little Nightmares is a simple platformer with stealth elements and puzzle solving. In a short Gamescom demo, I traversed an area, trying not to be seen by an overwhelmingly powerful enemy, while also figuring out how to gain enough platforming height to reach an elevated air vent. Philosophically and artistically, though, it's so much more.

"Even though we've got this solid core of a game idea, everyone in the studio has a different take on what’s going on," explains senior narrative director Dave Merkiv. "It would depend on who you talk to as to what the game means, but for me I see the cruelty of being a vulnerable kid caught in the middle of absolute grotesquery and trapped within these things that don't make sense."

You play the game as a tiny kid. In another short demo I had to sneak past a demonic chef slaving away in a kitchen, carving meat and cooking up a stew. Just by looking at him I knew that this guy wouldn't hesitate to cook me up, too. Using the girl's diminutive stature to my advantage I make it through the kitchen by hugging walls and sheltering within the shadows under tables. It's a tense, palm-sweating affair given the intimidating difference in size between you and the potential predator.

A vulnerable kid trapped in a confusing, repulsive situation can be interpreted in many ways: from growing up in an abusive home, to having a learning disability, to living in a war zone, or struggling through a life of poverty. What you read into ultimately comes down to your own life experiences, the story leaving just enough space for your own creativity and imagination to take hold.

With her vibrant yellow raincoat, the girl stands out against the dreadful space around her. The sense that she doesn't belong is made immediately apparent through this simple piece of visual design, which is essential thanks to dialogue and text having been removed entirely. Merkiv explains that his intention is to never have characters declare how and what they are thinking in any given moment, because that would undermine the game's more open approach.

Players are being trusted to digest the game for themselves. Little Nightmares is designed for adult consumption, despite the fact that games featuring a protagonist of such tender years are overwhelmingly aimed at children.

"We haven't been, and don't want to be, inspired too much by other games because we don't want to make games that have already been made," says Merkiv. "Everyone consumes these things so much now—they're voraciously playing games, watching movies, reading comics—so there's no point in re-making things, because all you're doing is diluting what people have already seen. It's much better to have a really clear idea of what you want to achieve and then allow things to seep out of your pores into that core idea, rather than just taking ideas from other games. You’re not really going anywhere if you do that."

The idea behind Little Nightmares bubbled up to the surface of Tarsier's shared consciousness more than a decade ago, and they've had a lot of time to refine the idea since. Announced at E3 2005, Tarsier Studios' adventure game City of Metronome was eventually cancelled. Much of the darker tone inherent to that project is survived in Little Nightmares.

"What's similar between both Little Nightmares and City of Metronome is the way that we want to exaggerate things and how we want that exaggeration to work into the essence of the game," says Andreas Johnsson, one of the co-founders of Tarsier. "We want to put everything on the outside, rather than hide it away on the inside. That makes so much sense in this game because it's told from the perspective of a child and shows how a kid would experience and interpret things in that very loud way."

Indeed, the game's setting—which is rather ominously called The Maw—is as outlandish and eccentric as game worlds come. An underwater construct, the origins and true nature of The Maw are being kept under wraps, although it's clear from the bleeding, obscene, repugnant interior design of the place that it's not somewhere anybody, kid or otherwise, would want to experience first-hand.

The only part of The Maw visible from the surface is an industrial chimneystack that stands monolithic upon a rock that peeks just above the water. Despite Mervik's talk about not taking ideas from other games, it's very reminiscent of Bioshock's lighthouse entrance to Rapture.

My hands-on impressions of the world were limited, but Little Nightmares is certainly a contender for the most striking and impressive game at Gamescom 2016. Its blend of horror and stealth works well, and narratively speaking is doing things far braver than most of the triple-A nonsense on show. If the full game is anywhere near as intriguing, we might just be in for something very special indeed.

Little Nightmares is due for release in Spring 2017 on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC.