The first time I played Little Nightmares, I fell in love almost instantly. Although I’m a total wuss when it comes to horror games, the Coraline-esque aesthetic very quickly sunk its hooks into me, and before long I found myself waiting for the release of the second game in 2021. In the meantime I stayed up trying to find out as much as I possibly could about the characters and setting. When Little Nightmares 2 launched it took me a single day to get through. You literally couldn’t have peeled me away from it if you tried. So, when the third game was announced in 2023, the excitement started all over again.
Little Nightmares 3 is the first game of the series to be developed by Supermassive Games rather than Tarsier Studios. Despite this change, it certainly looks the exact same as the other two games. When you begin the adventure, you awaken in a strange environment overwhelmed by a feeling of dread, and everything around you looks gigantic to really emphasise how small you are as a child. The same goes for the various humanlike creatures you encounter, alongside the main villains, all of which tower over you.
In previous games, one of the things that made the villains so scary was how close they were to being humans, yet there was something so unusual and off-putting about them like having an excessive amount of skin, one too many limbs, or having the ability to elongate parts of their body like a neck or an arm, which definitely isn’t possible.
They really felt like costumes for an entity which is never quite explained, which isn’t the case with Little Nightmares 3. The villains and creatures are still unsettling, but they aren’t as uncomfortable so don’t push you to stare at them, trying to figure out what exactly they are. You also don’t encounter a huge amount of them, which is a shame. There are only four areas, each with one or two enemy types—including what would be considered a “boss”.
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The less bloodstained design isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, especially if you’ve decided to play through it with someone who isn’t as good with gore. There are still moments of Little Nightmares 3 which make you grimace away from your screen, like when one enemy is carving up a body and feeding the insides to his sentient hand puppet, but for the most part you won’t spend much time wandering between hanging bodies or wading through entrails like you did before. Instead it’s mushrooms and various lollipops in this game. But with all that said, you do have to come closer than ever to most of the enemies you meet.
Combat was never a huge part of Little Nightmares, so I was skeptical when it was shown as a pretty significant thing in the newest game. Aside from swinging the odd pipe to smash clay children, a lot of your experience with the game’s enemies was accompanied by running and hiding.
In Little Nightmares 3, there are several instances where your progression is stopped by what I can only describe as ‘monster rooms’—small confined spaces where you and your partner have to work together to take down enemies that keep piling in. This includes Low shooting them with an arrow, before Alone runs in and smashes them with a wrench, and when you finally take down the last one your path is conveniently opened up so you can keep exploring.
I can’t say I’m crazy about these mechanics, and they feel clumsy in the same way they did on the rare occasion you’d have to use them in previous games. My depth perception failed me on one too many occasions, and since there’s no way to lock on your target, you just have to hope you’ve lined your shot up correctly.
Also, if you’re not playing with a friend then relying on the AI companion can be frustrating too, and the number of times I had to retrace sections because my robot friend had decided to jump off a ledge or miss an enemy definitely took away from the experience. Then again, this is no different from the AI companion in the second game simply refusing to be much use with any of the puzzles unless I pushed them around either.
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Fortunately, the puzzle solving in the third game is incredibly straightforward. Environments are by no means challenging to explore, and a lot of the time the puzzles you encounter involve pulling blocks around to reach different levels to grab items. Although each environment is completely different, they aren’t particularly engaging to explore—another reason the game feels like it could’ve done with a bit more time in development.
Most of the time you just travel between holes in the wall or vents in the foreground rather than having to use the entire depth of an area. This changes slightly towards the end of the game, but by the time you start getting used to it, you’ve already finished.
There are collectibles you can find in backrooms, but that’s the only thing to push you to go there and a lot of the time I gave it a miss for the sake of progressing to the next area. If I had known that the story would only take four hours to get through, I definitely would’ve spent a bit more time scouring the corners of each and every area. Even a little bit of lore, be it through an illustration or clue plastered on the wall, would’ve been enough to push me to explore more.
With only four “chapters” and a story which is only just being set up by the time the credits roll, it’s hard to think Little Nightmares 3 is by any means a finished game. It’s like you just get to a point where you settle into a rhythm and suddenly everything comes to an end. What story you do get a sense of feels rushed to a close, and there isn’t enough content to really justify its price tag.
Besides the clumsy combat, the character and world design feels like a Little Nightmares game, it just lacks in a lot of areas. I’d like to have seen more enemies, more environment variation, and just gotten to know the main characters a bit more. I wouldn’t be surprised if more comes in a future DLC, but I don’t feel like I’ll be waiting with bated breath this time.
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