My experience with the Little Nightmares series has never been solo. Although both the first and second games only support one player, while I’ve made my way through the hopeless settings of both, I’ve always been watched. My sister sat screaming in fear over my shoulder while I navigated the first one, and my housemates in university happily attempted to instruct me through the second. I was fully ready for Little Nightmares 3 to be the first I actually played on my own, until the demo released and I realised it had co-op—foiled again.
Little Nightmares 3 is the first of the series to feature co-op, and after just 30 minutes of crawling through Necropolis, I’ve come to the stark realisation that the entire series, or at least the sections where there’s already an NPC companion by your side, would’ve greatly benefited from supporting two players.
You still have the option to play with an AI companion if you’d rather go alone. If it’s anything like the companion in the second game, then I’d much rather recruit a second player than watch a computer stumble around trying to get in the right position to complete a basic puzzle. Being able to turn to my partner, someone who has never played a Little Nightmares game, during the demo and almost instruct him where to go definitely helped immerse me more into the game.
This also led to me getting spooked a bit easier too, even though I thought playing with someone else would make the game less intimidating. I wouldn’t say that Little Nightmares is a particularly jumpy set of horror games, but rather one that relies heavily on being mostly unsettling and occasionally psychological. It does a fantastic job at building its worlds in a way that makes you feel incredibly small, which is perfect, given that most of the time you’re exploring as a frightened child. When you’re accompanied by a second player, the fear of being alone is replaced by the dread of becoming separated.
The setting of The Spiral, and more specifically the Necropolis, which is where you spend most of your time in the demo, towers over you and even as you make your way through each area, you really start to feel the scale of things. Whether it’s climbing a ladder that seems to go on forever, or running out onto a balcony that makes you realise you’re so high up you can’t even see the ground, it all plays on your mind and instils the fear of being so vulnerable in a setting where it feels like literally everything is out to get you.
Even though the demo is short, you get a good look at how Little Nightmares 3 plans to stack up against its predecessors, too. You’ve got the classic sequence of walking around, solving quite basic puzzles, climbing, and then running in fear from whatever monster is looming over you (in this case, it’s a horrible giant baby). It’s as fun as it always has been in the series, though it already feels a bit more high-stakes.
Obviously, some designs differ slightly in Little Nightmares 3 as the game has been created with co-op in mind.
You didn’t have a huge amount of leeway in the previous games, and if you missed a chance to hide from an enemy, your chances of making it out alive were incredibly slim. But in the demo, it feels like you have an even smaller window of opportunity, which makes the whole game feel a lot more tense. This is obviously made slightly harder by the fact that two of you need to do it at the same time. If either of you miss a hiding spot, or jump, you will inevitably have to retrace your steps and do it all again.
The emphasis on combat also took me by surprise . You don’t have any means to defend yourself in either Little Nightmares game besides the odd moment of crushing enemies with a pipe you’ve picked up, but the two new protagonists sport different weapons, and it doesn’t take long to realise your only means of progression is through working together. There’s not enough room to mess each other around without it having pretty detrimental effects on your progress.
There’s only one section in the demo where you have to fight back, a room you become trapped in and then swarmed by beetles, but it takes a lot of focus and communication to get right. One person has to shoot the flying beetles down with a bow and arrow, while the other one finishes them off by slamming a wrench down onto them. I definitely wouldn’t trust an AI companion to pull this off as seamlessly as it needs to be done, seeing as it took me and my partner a few attempts to even get through.
Even outside of combat, you need to utilise your tools, a bow and a wrench, to solve the game’s puzzles. The bow can be used to take out ropes and drop things like boxes to help you reach new levels, whereas the wrench can operate machinery or break down weak doorways. It’s impossible to do one thing without the other, and while a lot of the demo has you both working in tandem, I look forward to whatever twisted ways Little Nightmares 3 forces you to separate from your companion and wonder if you’ll ever see them again when it launches on October 10.
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