Little Nightmares 3 review

The Little Nightmares games are humble in their intent, and that’s what makes them tick. You’re a tiny weakling moving forward 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 monstrosities want to kill you? Because you’re there.

These games are not works of narrative genius and that’s entirely to their credit. They’re cinematic platformers in the Inside mould, but they tell you nothing and rely entirely on implication. As far as we know, our freakish little protags have been on the run from diabolical terrors forever.

In Little Nightmares 3 we can glean a lot about the sordid realities of the environments we move through, but we never learn with any certainty what that means to us, or how we fit into it. We’re just running away. When I’m squirrelling through tiny crawlspaces in a horrible industrial candy factory-cum-Amazon fulfilment centre, all the better to avoid a multi-limbed granny who wants to claw me into devon slices, I don’t really care how I ended up there. The important thing is that I get out.

When I get out, I end up in a more horrifying place, from which I also have to escape. This is the reality our diminutive heroes must endure, forever.

Little Nightmares 3 extends its reach beyond the sickly domestic settings the series has formerly waded in, with its four chapters mostly taking place in exaggerated, unreal landscapes whose connection to the material world is loose. This time our little freaks are entirely out of their element, exploring bizarre windswept temples and morbid carnivals among other charming locales. The horror still leans heavily on the visual touchstones of childhood trauma—sickly dolls, exaggeratedly aged adults, evil puppets—but the artists have an exquisite knack for the grotesque that elevates otherwise over-familiar material.

To play, Little Nightmares 3 is functionally identical to its two predecessors, except this time there are two playable characters selectable at the start. Low has a bow-and-arrow, and Alone has a wrench. Commandeering one character will set the other on auto-pilot. Their unique abilities factor into puzzle solving and traversal in pretty straightforward ways that never get complicated: Low, of course, can trigger distant switches or destroy frayed ropes, while Alone can turn cogs and smash through weak walls.

Other tools become available across the four chapters, such as an umbrella, which can be used to ascend wind columns or descend safely, but they don't really alter the fundamentals. It's never less than obvious how these tools should be implemented to solve a problem, and this obviousness endures right until the very end. I sometimes yearned for something trickier, like the often diabolical puzzles in Unravel 2, or the Trine games. Solving a puzzle is rarely gratifying because they don't pose a stiff challenge—they're really just there to provide relief between more tense moments.

Little Nightmares 3 can be played cooperatively, which is apparently something a lot of people wanted from this series. It's a fun idea, but it’s online only, whereas I think local co-op would have worked better in this instance. When two players aren't sitting together but are relying on each other, the game's sometimes tedious trial-and-error elements, and the imprecision of its platforming, are exacerbated.

Nevertheless, it's fun more often than not, and playing in co-op can alleviate the feeling that this has all been done before. After playing the first two games, the formula to which Little Nightmares 3 holds steadfast is overfamiliar now. I know that I'll spend a bunch of time being teased with evidence of a big baddie. I know I'll spend some time wandering through tense, gorgeously decorated rooms, lifting grates, pushing boxes, and hoisting through windows. I know there will be chase scenes, and some stealth scenes, and some puzzle rooms. It really feels like going through the motions at times.

As a result, Little Nightmares 3 is mostly unscary too, though it's still potent on an atmospheric level. Performance was great on my RTX 3060 gaming laptop with everything set to medium. There were no technical stumbles or frame drops at all, and I likewise enjoyed playing at a virtually locked 30 fps on Steam Deck with everything set to low. There are plenty of options to fiddle with if you feel so inclined, including three tiers of ray tracing for more powerful PCs.

Even after three games it's always morbidly fascinating when I finally get to see the big pursuing baddies in all of their disgusting glory. But I never felt tense playing Little Nightmares 3, and part of me wonders if that's the point.

I’ve read people talk about the "cosiness" of horror games, which I take to mean that the pulse of the genre is so ingrained that we know when we can be calm and poke around. We know when shit has hit the fan. We know that the worst that can happen (which is not bad because of course this is a game) is that we’ll be thrown back to a checkpoint. It’s less to do with being numb to frights and more to do with an understanding of genre orthodoxies.

Little Nightmares 3 bottles this sensation, almost to the point of gentrification. It’s cutesy, dioramic horror that looks bleak but isn’t very scary, and it's also basically a rollercoaster game, almost entirely reliant on spectacle. This grants its creators a lot of wriggle room when it comes to gorgeous cinematography, and this entry is arguably even more visually impressive than its predecessors. But when it comes to the things you do with your hands, it feels a little rote.