Little Maddie Dear is a game made for the 2020's Halloween event. It stars a young girl named Maddie, who's on a journey to paradise that's supposed to be located in the attic of her house, with only her talking stuffed toy to keep her company. And the monsters, of course, because this isn't a walking simulator. Loads of different monsters are roaming around the nightmarish, mazelike halls of the house and their only wish to send you to the beautiful Game Over screen. And it will happen often, because Little Maddie Dear doesn't play around, so neither should you! But more on that later.

To start with the game's strongest point, it's definitely the presentation. Music and sound effects are pretty nice, but where the game shines is its graphics. It uses some MV RTP, mostly the tilesets, but everything is edited into its own unique style and theres a lot of custom stuff around that certainly makes the game world feel a lot more scary and immersive than it otherwise be. There's also all the custom portraits and images, documents to find and overall, this is a very pretty game. The particular highlight are the monster designs.

Regarding monsters, there's only a few of them and they are introduced gradually. There's sleepwalking bunnies, that walk slowly in a set pattern, but give you a game over instantly if you touch them. There's monsters that chase you if you get too close to them and damage your HP if they touch you. There's monsters that are afraid of the light of your lantern and others that are attracted to it.

In order to deal with the, you gradually gain three abilities, plus one item. You start the game off with the aforementioned lantern. That one can be turned on and off. Seeing as the default light radius is very small, you will want to keep the lantern on almost constantly, but there's one monster type that only attacks you if you have the lantern on, so you will need to make do without light in places.

Then, you gain the first ability, Run, which will increase your movement speed for a few seconds, alowing you to outrun the chasers. Then, you get Scream, which stuns all the monsters on the screen for a few seconds, allowing you to get away. And the final ability is Rest, which I think restores some HP at the cost of Stamina? Not sure. All the abilities cost Stamina, which is a limited resource, and also have cooldowns, so you can't just spam them. All the abilities have their use. Run can be used to get away from most monsters, but there are some that can't be outrun and you have to stun them with Scream instead.

The maps are full of goodies to help you, secrets to collect and some traps, where a suspiciously placed treasure chest leads to the sudden appearance of a monster you have to deal with. The secrets in particular are nice and if you do all the "sidequests" for the few characters in the game that aren't mosnters, you'll get an alternate ending.

The game has savepoints in the form of mirrors, but don't expect many freebies. You can heal yourself to full HP and Stamina at the savepoint, but only once, afterwards you can only use it to save. The only way to restore your HP and Stamina otherwise is to find candies in the various treasure chests around. There's also some items that decrease your HP instead, so avoid those. And you will need those items, because apart from monsters, the game also features damaging floor that you have to walk through to reach the other side.

The maps are... well, the game seems to go for the "nightmarish maze" style, meaning that the maps are massive mazes consisting of very long, narrow hallways, connecting various weird rooms. Don't expect a logical layout to anything. While this succeeds in establishing that "nightmarish maze" concept, it also makes it really hard to keep track of where to go, where you were and where you are heading. The light radius also doesn't help. And with the ever lurking monsters and later the damaging floors, you'll probably backtrack through several times looking for the exit with your HP and Stamina dwindling dangerously low and you running out of healing items very quickly.

The maps are probably a bit too big. The first one was fine, the second one was pushing it and last one could have been cut in half with a third of the corridors removed and you would still get hopelessly lost.

Little Maddie Dear is unforgiving in its difficulty. It's a slow burn though, the healing items are limited and you will spend a lot of time with dangerously low HP and Stamina, hoping that you'll eventually find a chest with a healing item or the exit. The last area used to be hell on earth where difficulty was concerned, now it's still nightmarish, but atleast now there's chests with healing items around the level. Before, the chests in the last level all contained items that reduced your HP, which was way overboard, especially considering that the last level worse than the previous two combined. Thankfully, that's since been fixed.

There's also one issue I had. I missed a note near the start that that told you what to do against a particular monster type. Orevious monsters were introduced very well, but this one had a cutscene where Maddie used a crate to block off its path, leading me to believe that's how you were supposed to deal with them, until I discovered my error. What you are supposed to do is read a random note that tells you that they are attracted to the light and you should turn it off when you hear their charging noise. Considering their frequent presence, this probably should've been communicated to the player better, instead of relying on them to find a certain note.

Overall, this is a very nice game. I was thinking about whether to give it 3.5 or 4 stars. Mostly because of the last level, which was just way over the top. But in the end I've decided to be merciful and not hold it against the game too much, especially since it was improved from the first version. If you have patience and don't mind hard games, give this one a try. Chances are you'll enjoy it.