Little Nightmares 3 Review

The Little Nightmares series can always be relied on for a succinct puzzle platforming romp through a gallery of horror-adjacent imagery and lightly interactive encounters with tragically unsettling monsters. Little Nightmares III ticks those boxes just fine, but even with the welcome addition of two player co-op it seems uninterested in exploring beyond the surface level of what the series can offer. It joins its protagonists in a metaphorical spiral, circling back over the same ideas until its abrupt end.

The Spiral is where we meet Low and Alone, the game’s dual playable stars and the unfortunate next pair of children to bear witness to the fear and filth of Little Nightmares’ vile world. Bereft of dialogue and with little introduction, we’re compelled to assume that the goal of these two is to escape The Spiral’s unknowable landscape. Doing so means travelling through a series of loosely-themed environments – a necropolis, a candy factory, a carnival and more – solving puzzles and evading mortal danger at every step.

As otherworldly and allegorical as it’s supposed to be, The Spiral suffers by not having a strong throughline to make it a formidable space. There’s very little connective tissue between the four distinct environments that make up its individual chapters, each bound by portal-like mirrors but otherwise entirely separate. It lacks a sense of place or context, something that The Maw and The Pale City achieved. The upside is that there is plenty of visual and thematic variety, but it lacks impact by the end.

The best way to glean any sort of insight or meaning from the game’s settings is to seek out supplementary materials like the Sounds of Nightmares audio series, which has direct ties Little Nightmares III. It’s an interesting enough bit of media, but the idea of listening to three hours of wordy fiction for the sake of better understanding an internationally wordless game with a runtime only an hour or two longer feels like a step too far.

To this new entry’s credit, the series has never really hinged on comprehension of its plots, serving more as a vibe piece and an aesthetic plate than a fiction meant for proper digestion. And that continues to come across in the third entry. There’s just the right mix of foreboding and beckoning in the atmosphere here that begets turning each new corner to view the next beautiful terror, rendered all the more keenly as they are on modern console hardware.

But Little Nightmares III is a game held back by the legacy of the Tarsier-developed prequels, with the newly appointed Supermassive Games (yes, that Supermassive) seemingly uninterested in bringing its unique experience to the table. There’s some value in working with the blueprint that players know and understand, and there’s certainly a very distinct tone and formula that both prior games have established that’s interesting, but that well can only hold so much water. Running around atmospheric, dioramic environments flipping switches and scrounging for secret collectibles is still a good time, it’s just not engaging any new thoughts or feelings.

One crucial point of difference with Low and Alone, is that both come equipped with unique tools to prepare them for the trials at hand. For Low, it’s a bow and arrow, while Alone is packing a giant (at scale) wrench. These are mostly used to solve environmental puzzles (arrows to shoot out-of-reach switches or break distant objects and a wrench to smash weak walls or turn bolts), but they also come in handy in a scant few tussles with The Spiral’s unruly inhabitants. It’s all pretty benign stuff emblematic of Little Nightmares’ unchallenging design, but at the very least it’s a much needed, if very slight, change in cadence.

When it comes to the main event in each chapter though – meeting and then dealing with an especially twisted ‘boss’ creature – it’s business as usual. Like before, discovering these unsettling human-adjacent antagonists is half the fun of the game, and the roster in Little Nightmares 3 passes the vibe check. I won’t spoil any of them here, but there’s at least one all-timer in the mix that might have Little Nightmares II’s Long Teacher beat for actual nightmare fuel. Again, the main issue here is just that the actual moment-to-moment gameplay these run-ins offer is what’s expected and nothing else – a few puzzle-lite stealth portions followed by tense chase sequences and a predetermined execution.

There are some genuinely inspired segments along the way, though it takes progressing the bulk of the game to find them, and then it’s over just as soon as your reasoning and reflexes are finally being tested. There’s an air of dread that the original games nailed, and threatens to appear here, but ultimately dissipates once you start to see the workmanlike frame that its tapestry of horrors hangs on.

The biggest reason to dive back into this world of nightmares is a brand-new way to play with the addition of full cooperative multiplayer for two people. Little Nightmares III is playable from end-to-end with a buddy, via online co-op. The option for couch play obviously would have been great, but the distinction allows for a bit more freedom for Low and Alone tlo split up, as well as reducing communication to a simple ‘call’ action in lieu of dedicated voice chat (though you can use platform-based/third party chat if you really want to).

Playing in co-op also gives back some agency to the game’s puzzles and stealth/chase sequences, something that’s lost in solo play as your AI counterpart automatically solves half of everything by design. The counter to this is by reinstating the trial-and-error approach to encounters in co-op, you’re also doubling the potential rate of error. That can be frustrating, especially if you’re repeatedly being sent to the beginning of a slower paced stealth segment, but the biggest pain points are mercifully few and far between.

t’s a blessing that the game can be knocked over in a handful of hours, as there’s no crossover of progression between single and multiplayer, nor for co-op sessions with different friends – everything gets a separate save file. It mostly makes sense, this is a game you’d want to experience in its fullness alongside someone else rather than in sporadic pieces, but having to start fresh if you can’t align a play session and just want to go it alone might sting. The Friends Pass system that we’ve seen in games like It Takes Two and Split Fiction, where you’re able to jump in with a friend online from a single copy of the game is a definite boon though.

Final Thoughts

Taking over custody of a franchise with as dedicated a community as Little Nightmares must come with some level of caution, but coming in with a pedigree like Supermassive’s might have implied a level of confidence and craft to break new ground with it. Instead, this is an incurious and reiterative sequel that sheepishly offers fans what they want and expect, rather than risk showing them something new.

It may seem harsh to knock a game for doing what’s already proven to work, especially when I had praise for all of the same qualities when I reviewed Little Nightmares II, but we’ve been here before. Twice now. And a fresh set of eyes and hands could (and should) have resulted in something more. What’s here is perfectly fine, enjoyable and comfortably familiar, just not at all essential.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro // Review code supplied by publisher

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