“Little Nightmares III” follows the story of Low and Alone as they journey through The Spiral and is the third installment in the Little Nightmares horror franchise. It features both online multiplayer and singleplayer with an A.I. companion. This review will contain small, generalized spoilers, but nothing specific.
Tarsier Studios, the team that made the first two games, announced they were moving on to other projects just days after the second game’s release, leaving the future of the franchise uncertain. Just about two years ago, however, Bandai Namco announced that Supermassive Games was developing “Little Nightmares III”. As a huge fan of the franchise for almost six years, and having bought a lot of merchandise during that time, I was ecstatic about the announcement of a third game! Unfortunately, though, it has been less than perfect.
Don’t get me wrong, “Little Nightmares III” is still a great game overall, and it does a lot right as a Little Nightmares game. The graphics are incredible, and having a variety in color schemes between the different chapters is a breath of fresh air. Low and Alone are also great protagonists with incredible chemistry as characters; I might even prefer them as a duo over Six and Mono. However, the game has its fair share of clear problems.
The Spiral, as a game location, feels disconnected and arbitrary. You travel through mirrors to traverse chapters, but this loses the sense of scale and importance I felt playing other games in the series. “Little Nightmares I” follows Six through The Maw, ruining crucial parts of their operation as you go. When you kill an enemy in that game, it feels meaningful, since you know the role that monster played in the larger workings. However, doing the same in “Little Nightmares III” felt empty, since afterward I just teleported to a different place with seemingly no connection to the previous one.
The majority of The Spiral’s lore is found in external media. For instance, The Carnevale, and its respective enemy are the focus of one of the six Sounds of Nightmares episodes.
Although the podcast itself is superb, and I highly recommend it, shoving important lore into outside stories leaves uninformed players confused. I listened to the podcast when it was released over two years ago, but by now I had forgotten all about it, leaving me just as lost.
I will dance around any massive spoilers here, but the “big bad” of the game also suffers from these same problems, in the way that it does not feel like a “big bad.”. It does not appear until the last chapter, due to the game’s disconnectedness, and the player is not given any context for why it is there; the is revealed in separate stories.
Check this against the previous two games, where both of the final bosses taunt you throughout, and the problem is blaring. This all leads to the climax of “Little Nightmares III” feeling lackluster. The upcoming DLC has the potential to save this, but I have never been a believer that DLC should be necessary to enjoy a game.
Besides the story, the multiplayer is not anything special. Low and Alone each have a tool you’ll need to progress. This is a neat idea on the surface, which unfortunately ended up with mediocre execution. Oftentimes, Alone will use her wrench to break down a wall in one room, and, after squeezing through, there will be a rope Low needs to shoot with his bow. This separation of “multiplayer” puzzles occurs far too often throughout the game, making multiplayer as a whole feel like an afterthought.
It Takes Two, widely considered to be one of the best co-op games of all time, gives each character vastly different abilities at each level. That way, you could replay the entire game with the other character and have a completely new experience. Unfortunately, when I restarted Little Nightmares III from the beginning, switching my character from Low to Alone, I didn’t feel any difference in the gameplay, since the players themselves are always performing generally the same actions.
Adding to the rough aspects of the “Little Nightmares III” multiplayer, the game lacks split-screen co-op, a horrific choice by the developers. For a friend to join, they must download a free friend’s pass from a separate device. As salt in the wound, cross-play was not offered at launch, meaning both players must be running the game on the same device type. If you were on PC and your friend was on Xbox, you wouldn’t be able to connect. All of this makes an already disappointing multiplayer experience difficult to even begin playing.
I found the singleplayer experience just as bad, just in different ways. The A.I. is slow; it runs up to doors, but walks the last five seconds before helping you push it open. Chases become less thrilling, since the A.I. runs in front of you, meaning all you have to do to survive is follow it instead of deciphering the path for yourself or with a friend. You also have to line up the A.I. for certain puzzles; otherwise, it will just stand and stare at you. None of these problems are game-ruining, but they annoyed me enough during my own playthrough that I wanted to mention them here.
The chapters also have apparent flaws individually. There are four in the game, and two of them are fairly bland and generally uninteresting. On top of that, all but one of the monsters felt generally uninspired and left no real impact on me after I had finished playing. Unlike the first two games, I also would not consider “Little Nightmares III” to have any particularly memorable moments or scenes, making my playthrough feel more bland looking back.
“Little Nightmares III” costs $40, a steep price for four to six hours of gameplay. The friend’s pass being free justifies this a bit, since you’re technically paying for two people, but the game still released with an extra $27 of day-one DLC cosmetic costumes.
As a long-time Little Nightmares fan, I was fine paying this hefty price for the game, and in fact bought the $140 Spiral Edition preorder, but I do think $40 is a bit much for what this game offers the average player.
Despite everything I said here, the game’s good parts outweigh its negatives. I just did not mention many good parts, since the majority would be around the lines of, “I enjoyed playing it because it is a Little Nightmares game, and those are inherently fun”. Since completing it, I have been further interacting with the fandom’s theories, listening to the Sounds of Nightmares podcast, and reading The Lonely Ones book.
Through this, “Little Nightmares III”’s story has become more coherent and enjoyable, but again, this should not be required. At the end of the day, and despite being a good game, “Little Nightmares III” is far from the best I know this franchise can deliver, and is definitely the weakest entry in the series.
