I really wish I hadn’t played Little Nightmares (the first game) and part of the 2nd one before reviewing Little Nightmares III. While this won’t be a negative review, I can’t help but compare it to my earlier experiences with the series and find it somewhat lacking. I’ll go into more detail throughout the review, but know that in a vacuum, I would have probably scored this higher. It’s human nature to compare to past experiences, so that’s what I’ll do…
More info that might be of value: I’ve fully beaten the first game only this year, so it’s still pretty fresh. I had started the 2nd game too, but stopped and thought it might be interesting diving into the 3rd without the full prior knowledge. Very curious where the 2nd game will rank after I’ve beaten it, and it certainly jumped the priority list after this experience.
Also of note, is that this game is made by Supermassive Games, who made a bunch of games I really enjoyed, like Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology and The Quarry. And they also made the Enhanced Editions for the previous Little Nightmares, which made them a logical fit. The original studio, Tarsier, is now working on their own new IP called REANIMAL, which got postponed to next year, probably because of Little Nightmares III releasing in October.
But enough babble on the side stuff. Let’s jump into this nightmare with our tiny little feet, and right before Halloween too! Perfect spooky timing, right?
ℹ️ Reviewed on Xbox Series X | Review code provided by Day One MPM. This review is the personal opinion of the writer.
| Developer | Supermassive Games |
| Publisher | Bandai Namco Entertainment |
Things I liked!
- Two playable characters | You can start the game as Low or Alone. Low will have a bow & arrow as a new mechanic unique to him, and Alone has a giant wrench she can use to open valves or smash walls. You can choose either, and it won’t really impact your playthrough all that much, but there is an achievement for beating the game again with the other character.
- The partner AI is on-point | I played the entire game solo and the other character never got in the way and always helped solve puzzles like I would want it to. I’m seriously impressed by this because it’s so often a factor of extreme frustration in such games, and Little Nightmares III nailed the behaviour of the non-playable character. I did get them killed myself by not paying attention. EDIT: this was when I was playing as Low, my experience playing as Alone wasn’t so seamless.
- A respawn is never far off | You’ll fail often, as the entire game is designed upon experimentation and learning from your mistakes, and luckily, there is hardly any runback to get back to the point of your demise. EDIT: there was one exception in the game when I needed to find 2 power plugs and dying reset the entire progress of that area, and I had to also find the other one again.
- It looks and sounds amazing | The atmosphere is why you play Little Nightmares III, and it still nails that aspect. You really do feel like a tiny being in a world of giants, which makes it so unique, especially as a horror game (although it’s not ever scary). The audio design of the bosses chasing you and the objects you interact with also never fails to deliver. The Carnival area was my favourite in the game, with a non-playable section where you ride a roller coaster, being a visual highlight of the game.
- Accessibility features | One of the crucial features for me was the accessibility option to turn on item highlights. The game is very dark, with low contrast in some regions, and just knowing where to find the item needed to progress more easily was a timesaver. You can also set a different colour for environment interactions (like ladders and doors) and items you can pick up, including collectables, which makes it easier to get their achievements.
Mixed & disliked!
- Item highlight breaks immersion and isn’t reliable | While I never went back to turning off the highlights because they were so useful, it also broke the immersion for me, as your nose is rubbed into the fact you’re playing a game. I would have preferred a version where a temporary highlight would appear after pressing a specific button. There was also a moment I got stuck because I had moved a box from under a table, thinking I had to jump up somewhere, but there was a trapdoor UNDER the table. Not highlighted and hidden by the table’s shadow. I ran around for 10 minutes looking for where to go next, and just coincidentally fell through in the end.
- Co-op doesn’t allow couch play | Co-op only works through an online connection. And while the other person doesn’t need to own the game (you can give them a free “pass”), it’s silly that you can’t play this on the same screen. I even played the Gamescom 2024 demo that way…. Also, there is no cross-platform play, so your friend had better own an Xbox too…
- Trial & Error | SO much of the game relies on trial & error that it becomes frustrating knowing you’ll die a few times to each escape or boss fight. Debris will fall on your head with no indication of where it’ll land, and the enemy will behave in a certain way that you can’t foretell without having lived through a death already. To add insult to injury, there are quite a few achievements tied to this. At the time of writing, the “beat the final boss without taking damage” one, called Hand-Eye Coordination, is at a whopping 00.42% earned… There are also a lot of doors going to off-camera rooms that just have you falling to your death.
- Patience required | I’ve not often seen patience as a gameplay mechanic, but very often you’ll need to just wait for an enemy to complete a specific routine before you can even move a muscle. Combine this with the above Trial and Error and the test of patience becomes a test of endurance and the temptation to just quit playing was present a few times.
- 3D jumping isn’t always great | I recall dying more to the 3D movement in the first little nightmares, especially when walking on a narrow beam or similar platforming movement, so this has been improved already, but I still had one section where I was supposed to just jump onto a box and missed the jump 3 times. For some reason, the character always jumps right and forward there, missing the platform and plummeting to their demise. Still listing it as a negative, because unwarranted deaths are never nice, but I feel like this is a leftover problem the previous game had as well (and even worse)
- Bugs | I only added this after my 2nd playthrough, but playing as Alone (character with the wrench) had a lot more issues.
- Low would sometimes refuse to use his bow & arrow on buttons (forcing me to find a throwable object)
- There was a moment in the Carnival level where I had to jump on top of a cage Low was captured in, but the jump button didn’t work. A quick search made me realise a ton of people were soft locked at this part, and some even restarted the entire chapter (I used a “load” from the main menu and got around it)
- Quickly after that, there is a plank to a hot air balloon that the other character kept falling off of.
- I beat the entire game again with the 2nd character, and the Achievement for it didn’t pop.
- No central location or story | There is not a spoken word in the game, and that wasn’t the case in the previous two either, but the first game left me with a morale of “gluttony = bad” and because it took place on a single, giant ship full of enemies eating themselves close to bursting, it felt more coherent. In Little Nightmares 3, you jump through a mirror after every level and end up in a completely new place. You start being chased by a giant doll, then a candy factory, then a carnival and you end the game in a mental hospital. But there is no overarching message here, which left me feeling empty after beating it.
- Only 4 chapters | The previous two games had 5 chapters and felt longer than this one. It took me 5 hours in my first run but with A LOT of messing around, I thought at some point I’d get an achievement for breaking glass bottles and easily took 1 hour extra to find and break them all to no real reward. If you’re good at solving puzzles, it can easily be beaten in a little under 3 hours. That would be fine, but they do charge the full price for this and even have a package with 2 paid DLC, which kind of feels like a money-grab this early (it’s not playable yet).
- Weird padding | The game is super short and still it felt like there was weird padding to make it just a few seconds longer. I lost count of the amount of times I’d just climbed through a heavy metal door, just to cross the next room and have to do the same thing. Those locations cost time to make, but there wasn’t anything in those rooms to interact with, and felt like they were only there to make the world feel just a tiny bit larger and add maybe a few minutes total to the clock. It was really off-putting how often I encountered a room like this with no purpose. As if content was pulled from it to make a deadline, or maybe my first hunch is more correct and it’s really just to make it feel bigger (but they failed if that was the case)
How long did I play the review before publishing? 9 hours (two and a half playthroughs)
How long to beat the story? 3 hours
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 740/1000G or 27/32
How long to achieve 1000G | should be doable in ~6-7 hours (requires two playthroughs)
You’ll love this game if you like these | Little Nightmares 1 & 2, Bramble: The Mountain King.
CONCLUSION
Score: 62/100
Little Nightmares has never felt this small.
I really can’t shake the feeling that I would have scored this much higher and had fewer complaints, if I didn’t play the first Little Nightmares before it. But it’s human nature to judge based on previous experiences, so that’s inevitably what everyone will do here. Fans have every right to be upset that this didn’t meet expectations.
Is it still worth playing through? Definitely! But maybe put this one in the “wait for a sale” category. And I’m sure it’ll feel like a more complete game when the DLC episodes are out.
I’ll be jumping into the 2nd game now after this, since Jim reviewed that one and gave it a whopping 95% score!
Prefer to see the game in action? We’ve got you covered with gameplay of the first chapter:
Robby lives and breathes video games. When he’s not playing them, he’s talking about them on social media or convincing other people to pick up a controller themselves. He’s online so often, he could practically list the internet as his legal domicile. Belgian games-industry know-it-all.
