Little Nightmares III review for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch

I am a huge fan of both the first and second Little Nightmares games. Little Nightmares II is probably the best game in that sort of “genre”, with maybe The Midnight Walk coming in close behind. That particular style of unsettling horror and light puzzle mechanics is so perfectly executed in both of the previous games, and it is surprisingly absent from most of Little Nightmares III.

At the end of Little Nightmares II, I was left satisfied but certainly hoping for another entry in the future. While I can’t say it’s bad, Little Nightmares III is not at all what I was looking for, and I am left wanting another proper entry to the series even more after finishing it.

Little Nightmares III has 4 levels, which is fewer than the previous entries, although the future DLC promises an additional 2 full levels. This leaves the base game feeling incomplete, and makes that future DLC feel like the end of the game that you are being charged more to experience later on. This is already a bad look, but couple it with the fact that Little Nightmares III feels like the most rushed, lowest effort offering in the series, and I found myself more than a little disappointed by the end of my brief 3.5-4 hours.

The first two areas here are bad. Boring and bad, there is no way to dance around it. The joy in solving the intriguing but relatively simple environmental puzzles is gone, replaced with either the AI companion acting on their own or your character automatically raising their own weapon to direct you to a solution. Everything is solved with the tools that the two main characters have, either the bow or the wrench, which takes all of the guesswork out of solving these things. The game is so clearly built for co-op play, they have to program the AI companion to automatically do a large portion of the work for you if you do not have another person filling that role.

When it comes to the co-op, it might be the most poorly implemented co-op system I have seen in a long time. There is no same-screen/same-console co-op, at all. This game would be *PERFECT* for something akin to Split/Fiction or It Takes Two, but co-op here is locked to online only, with someone else on another console. Even that manages to disappoint, as it is not drop-in/drop-out. If you start the game with a friend and they decide to stop playing, you cannot simply pick up and continue from where you left off; you must start a whole new game over and play solo. Sure, they offer the “friend-pass” system that has become popular recently, allowing you to share the game with a friend for free to allow them to play along with you, but the implementation is so poor, I see very little incentive to try and engage with this mode. To add even more to that, there is no incentive to play as the other playable character.

Who you choose to be matters very little outside of the difference in which tool you are assigned with using. This is another disappointment, as Little Nightmares II practically demanded you go back and replay the game as Six once you finished your first playthrough. Little Nightmares III offers no real narrative incentive to play through it again, and the gameplay is so straightforward and relatively boring that once I was finished, I was more than happy to move on to something new.

This isn’t to say I hated Little Nightmares III. The second half is solid, returning to a more deeply unsettling pair of boss encounters and some excellent level design. The grotesque characters in the Carnevale level belong right up there with the series greats, and while the final boss does not come anywhere near the final boss in Little Nightmares II, it is a more than worthy conclusion to the game.

Visually, Little Nightmares III is just fine, with the opening two levels again falling somewhat flat while the final two manage to shine just a little more brightly. Overall, this game just feels somewhat rushed, which may be due to the new development team at Supermassive taking the reins to the series. All in all, while there is something to like here, most players will ultimately be let down by a disappointingly empty sequel to a great second title.

Note: Bandai Namco provided us with a Little Nightmares III code for review purposes.