“Little Nightmares III” Review

Little Nightmares III is a very good game and Supermassive’s first attempt is a more than valid entry to the series thanks to its timeless art style and terrifying yet riveting design that’s thankfully a tad more lengthy than its predecessors.

They definitely have their fans, but horror games are typically not my cup of tea. Little Nightmares hits different though. Over the years, Tarsier Studios made something gruesome yet approachable and moving forward nearly a decade, Supermassive Games appears to have continued the tradition of making a frightening yet cozy title.

Little Nightmares III stars two best friends, Low and Alone, as they try to escape dark and troubling predicaments in the Nowhere. Both of them carry items that act both as tools and weapons. The boy, Low, carries a bow that can he can shoot at enemies, buttons and switches among other things. Alone, the pigtailed girl, carries a wrench that can smash walls and activate other mechanisms.

The main draw with Little Nightmares III is that it supports online co-op. Like Hazelight’s co-op only games, the game also includes a Friend’s Pass, so that you can play with others online whether or not they have their own copy. Unfortunately, while Little Nightmares III is available for every modern console, including the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the game does not support cross-play co-op. There are a bunch of other issues with multiplayer too, but we’ll go over that later.

If you’ve played a Little Nightmares game before, you should be in very familiar territory. Little Nightmares III is still very much a puzzle platformer that relies more on flight than fight. Sure, Low and Alone have some pretty cool weapons in their bow and wrench, but combat is both rare and clunky. More often than not, instead of fighting enemies, you’ll be hiding from them or thinking of ways to avoid their sight. Most puzzles and situations in the game are fairly simple to figure out thanks to environmental clues, but aside from that, there really isn’t much handholding here, which can be taken any which way.

Prior to my first hands-on with Little Nightmares III, I had never played a game in the series before. So when it came to doing things like grabbing my bow, I really had no idea what I was doing until tutorial prompts appeared. While they did seem to come during the times most needed, there was really no sense of guidance happening in the rest of the game unless caught in a situation where you forgot the controls.

I also had a couple instances where the game got stuck. In the first chapter, I went a little too deep near some garbage, and I couldn’t jump out of it. There was also a situation where Alone had to break open a door but couldn’t do it. During both those times, I had to restart the checkpoint.

There was a point in the first chapter of the game where I forgot I had an umbrella (which are used to safely fall high distances, or glide when air is floating upwards), so the game kindly reminded me of that. In the second chapter, one of the “bosses” constantly swiped at me, resulting in frequent death, and it took like 10 tries to figure out what I was supposed to be doing, and it wasn’t shooting at her wasn’t the answer. Luckily, you can stomach most failure thanks to forgiving checkpoints, but there are also times where the last checkpoint seemingly happened three screens before. It’s beyond annoying, especially if you have to open a hatch with your partner that takes an unnecessary amount of time over and over again.

Speaking of your partner, back to the multiplayer woes. While Hazelight was mentioned earlier, the only similarity with those games starts and ends with the Friend’s Pass. We already mentioned there’s no cross-play, and unfortunately there’s no couch co-op option either. The “good” news is multiplayer is completely optional. Your partner character, whether it’s Low or Alone, can be used by the CPU and aside from things you have to do in tandem, like jumping on weak platforms to break them to fall into the room under you, the AI is solid and isn’t really a detriment. It’s worth noting, though, that when you start playing one way, whether it’s solo or online co-op, you have to continue playing that way.

At the time of this review, the Friend’s Pass option wasn’t available yet as that’s being saved until the game’s launch, but at least on PlayStation 5, connecting with other players was pretty easy. The main difficulty was the fact the game doesn’t include voice communication, but that’s easily solved with party chat and/or Discord.

Supermassive’s reasoning for not including couch co-op was to retain the series’ optimal experience and immersion. I can understand that, as voice chat and split screens can cause the game to not feel eerie or mysterious anymore, but it also kind of ruins the enjoyment of multiplayer in the first place. The fact that you have to start the game one way and end the game that way is also annoying, and I had to figure that out the hard way.

For the sum of all its parts, Little Nightmares III is a very good game and Supermassive’s first attempt is a more than valid entry to the series thanks to its timeless art style and terrifying yet riveting design that’s thankfully a tad more lengthy than its predecessors. Its problem is that it doesn’t give players completely free reign to play how they want to play, needlessly locking them into whether they started solo or with a friend. With a friend, the game is absolutely enjoyable despite its lack of dedicated voice chat. Playing solo is also fun, but it doesn’t do much different than the previous game did as a single player experience.