Little Nightmares 3 review

The Little Nightmares games are modest in their intentions, and that’s what makes them work. You are a little weakling making your way through a hostile world. Where are you going? You just don’t know. Why are you there? It’s a dream. Why do all these trauma-inducing monsters want to kill you? Because you are there.

These games are not works of narrative genius and that is entirely their own merit. They’re cinematic platformers in the style of Inside, but they say nothing and rely solely on implications. As far as we know, our quirky little heroes have always been on the run from diabolical terrors.

In Little Nightmares 3, we can learn a lot about the grimy reality of the environments we move through, but we’ll never know for sure what it means to us or how we fit into it. We just run away. As I traverse the petite spaces of a hideous industrial candy factory attached to an Amazon fulfillment center, all the better to avoid the multi-armed grandma who wants to tear me into Devon slices, I don’t really care how I got there. The most essential thing is that I get out.

When I get out, I end up in a scarier place that I also have to escape from. This is the reality that our little heroes must endure forever.

Little Nightmares 3 moves beyond the sickly domestic setting the series has previously explored, with its four chapters taking place largely in exaggerated, unreal landscapes with a loose connection to the material world. This time our little freaks are completely out of their element, exploring bizarre, windswept temples and macabre carnivals among other charming locales. Horror still relies heavily on visual touchstones of childhood trauma – sickly dolls, exaggeratedly elderly adults, evil puppets – but the artists have a unique talent for the grotesque that elevates otherwise all-too-familiar material.

Gameplay-wise, Little Nightmares 3 is functionally identical to its two predecessors, with the only difference being that you can choose between two playable characters at the beginning. Low has the bow and arrows and Alone has the key. Commanding one character will cause the other to become autopilot. Their unique abilities have the effect of solving puzzles and traversing them in quite straightforward ways that are never complicated: Short can, of course, trigger distant switches or destroy frayed ropes, while Lone can turn cogs and smash through tender walls.

There are other tools available throughout the four chapters, such as an umbrella that can be used to climb wind columns or descend safely, but they don’t really change the basics. It is always obvious how these tools should be applied to solve the problem, and this obviousness persists until the very end. Sometimes I longed for something more challenging, like the often devilish puzzles in Unravel 2 or the Trine games. Solving puzzles is rarely rewarding because they don’t pose a complex challenge – they’re simply there to provide relief during more tense moments.

Little Nightmares 3 can be played cooperatively, which is apparently what many people have come to expect from the series. It’s a frosty idea, but only online, although I think a local cooperation would work better in this case. When two players are not sitting together but relying on each other, the sometimes tedious trial-and-error elements of the game and the inaccuracy of the platforming are exacerbated.

Still, it’s more often than not fun, and playing co-op can support ease the feeling that it’s all been done before. After playing the first two games, the formula that Little Nightmares 3 follows is now all too familiar. I know I’ll spend a lot of time being mocked by the evidence of a great villain. I know I’ll spend some time wandering through tense, exquisitely decorated rooms, lifting bars, pushing boxes, and rolling up windows. I know there will be chase scenes, stealth scenes, and puzzle rooms. Sometimes it really feels like I’m going through a rut.

As a result, Little Nightmares 3 isn’t terrible either, although it still has a robust atmosphere. Performance on my RTX 3060 gaming laptop was great when everything was set to medium. There were no technical hiccups or frame drops, and I also enjoyed playing at a virtually locked 30fps on Steam Deck with everything set to low settings. If you’re up for it, there are plenty of options available, including three levels of ray tracing for more powerful computers.

Even after three games, it’s always morbidly fascinating when I finally get to see the evil-chasing greats in all their disgusting glory. But I never felt tense while playing Little Nightmares 3, and part of me wonders if that’s the point.

I’ve read people talking about the “coziness” of horror movies, which I think means that the pulse of the genre is so ingrained that we know when we can composed down and poke around. We know when the shit hit the fan. We know that the worst that can happen (which isn’t a bad thing, because it’s obviously a game) is that we’ll be kicked back to the checkpoint. This has less to do with numbness to fear and more to do with understanding genre orthodoxies.

Little Nightmares 3 bottles this feeling, almost to the point of gentrification. It’s a charming, dioramic horror movie that looks bleak without being very scary, and it’s also basically a rollercoaster game that relies almost entirely on spectacle. This gives creators a lot of room to maneuver when it comes to great photography, and this entry is arguably even more visually impressive than its predecessors. But when it comes to things you do with your hands, it seems a bit routine.