Little Nightmares 3 - Review

Little Nightmares 3 brings us back into the world of childhood horror once more. A world that defies reason, monsters that play on your strangest fears and puzzles that leave you scratching your head. Its time to face your Nightmares once again. 

Little Nightmares 3 is the third entry in the series, and the first unique entry from Supermassive Games. Supermassive Games are the brains behind Until Dawn, The Quarry and the Dark Pictures Anthology, so with that resume of horror behind them how does Little Nightmares 3 stand up compared to the previous two beloved entries? Can Supermassive do this series justice, in a style that is brand new to them? 

Little Nightmares 3 is an interesting game. Developed as a co-op experience, I have to preface this with that I was unable to actually engage with the co-op experience of the game. Everything I’m going to talk about is from a solo player perspective, and it is possible that playing this alongside a friend (or from two different houses with a friend at least) may change things a little. The AI is competent enough to play solo and reacts to combat and environmental solutions pretty accurately for the most part, so for the solo player you’ll at least have a decent time playing through Little Nightmares 3. Please be warned there is going to be a fair bit of spoilers for the game throughout, as to really talk about the game, a lot of things need to be mentioned specifically. 

I am going to bang on about this decision to go with a co-op experience, however. Little Nightmares 3 I believe is somewhat hurt by its decision to be co-op focused. You can play as either Low or Alone; one being blessed with a giant wrench and the other with a bow and arrow. Puzzles will involve you using your characters abilities in a way that opens pathways forward, allows the other character to get into areas you can’t and allow you to progress forward. There is some level of replay value as a result of this. Playing as the other character to see sections that you didn’t as you were stuck on the other side of the wall. Alas, in a game that is about four hours long, this probably accounts for maybe ten or fifteen minutes at most of additional gameplay content. 

Little Nightmares is notorious for its Limbo style storytelling. A completely environmental journey, one that requires you to use your brain and think about the themes of the game. Little Nightmares 1 & 2 do a tremendous job of building up the story for you. Taking you through areas that reflect the inner turmoil and struggles of your character and tell a deep and thoughtful journey without ever using a word. Little Nightmares 3 suffers from a seeming misunderstanding of how to tell a story this way. The areas feel incredibly disjointed, the creatures and environments feel more of a ‘a child would be afraid of this’ choice, more so than something that feels directly relevant to the characters themselves. The issue here is something that overshadows a lot of the game. Little Nightmares 3 is a game that understands how to match this style in look but misses the fundamentals. 

This misunderstanding is most apparent in The Residents that you will encounter as you play through the game. In almost an homage love letter, The Residents feel less like terrifying and unknowable creatures of a distorted nightmare, and more a bland redesign of previous entries Residents. Instead of a terrifying antagonist like The Thin Man, or the barrelling disgusting horde of denizens in The Guests. We’re giving almost muted versions of these. In the second chapter you’ll encounter a large number of The Herd, who look threatening but are as dangerous as a kitten for the most part. The Supervisor who turns into a Spider feels like an attempt to recreate The Teacher from Little Nightmares 2, but in a far less intimidating way. The Residents fail to really strike fear into you, and are used so sparingly through the game, that there never really feels like they are actually dangerous. 

Puzzles have been a core part of the Little Nightmares series as well. They make a return here in Little Nightmares 3 but calling them puzzles is somewhat of a stretch. Nothing is particularly taxing or mind-bending. The solutions are obnoxiously straightforward for the most part, and if you are playing solo, the AI will often just move to where you need them to be for the puzzle progress, which takes out some of the environmental storytelling aspects that typically lead you to the solutions. There is a fun mechanic added in, in the final chapter. The problem here lays in how little time you spend with this mechanic. You use it twice, and then the game pretty much reaches its climax. New mechanics are added, and then just as you can see a moment of complexity, you have it taken away and its never approached again. 

Further to this, the game controls like mud. Little Nightmares has never had the greatest movement and controls, but it’s always been done in a way that doesn’t hinder you but enhances things. Little Nightmares 3 will often have you jumping and trying to pull yourself up on a ledge two or three times before your character will catch. The lack of definable depth perception also causes you to run on diagonals most of the time and fall off ledges constantly. Add to this the fact your partner can just get in your way and the scariest thing most of the time is just trying to navigate platforming and narrow ledges.  

The most frustrating part however is how obvious it is that there are things placed in the world that are encouraging you to play around with a friend. The moment this truly clicked for me was seeing a swing in the distance, jumping on it and trying to play on it. With a friend you’d be able to push each other back and forth and have a bit of a laugh. The developers clearly knew this too, as in solo play, your NPC partner has unique waiting and resting animations specifically for these environmental items. For an AI that is so quick to switch on for combat and reacting to its environmental tasks, surely a little work could have been done to make the NPC partner actually engage in this environmental objects with you. Not everyone is going to have someone to play with and being denied major parts of the game because of this is just a bad choice. 

Little Nightmares 3 is a quick little return to Nowhere but is easily the weakest entry in the series. A game that feels more like pandering and a love letter to the previous entries, it doesn’t try anything new and is hurt because of it. It looks and feels like a Little Nightmares game, but there is a fundamental lack of understanding of what made these games truly great. There is no major moments of tension, no massive scares. The chases are decent but so infrequent that they feel one and done when they happen. The puzzles can hardly be called such, and the story fails to hit on the depth and nuance that previous entries had. Little Nightmares 3 is not a bad game, but it is not a good Little Nightmares game. The egregious choice to already have the DLC chapter on display and for purchase in the game already is also one that leaves me scratching my head. The DLC is going to have to do some major work to make this game feel full.

The Score

5.5

Review code provided by Bandai Namco

The Pros

NPC AI is surprisingly reactive

Each character does feel unique to play as

Care to make things to do in Co-op is evident

The Cons

Story is lacking any true depth

The Residents are weak rehashes of previous ones

Controls like walking through mud