After about an hour taking part in Little Nightmares 3, I might used an individual’s bisected halves to unravel a puzzle, gotten a excessive rating in a carnival capturing sport and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged child. As a 2-foot-tall youth attempting to outlive the morbid risks of 1 demented space after one other with my co-player, I used to be terrified and delighted.
I’ve solely sampled the primary two Little Nightmares video games, however in my transient preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined model of the sequence’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a big, grim world crammed with traps to evade, puzzles to unravel and horrid, deadly enemies to outwit. Take the size of the animated horror film 9, combine it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let gamers benefit from the haunting trip, room by perilous room.
This time, gamers aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Video games, two gamers (or one and an AI companion) select between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a lady with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who depend on one another and get out of rooms utilizing their distinctive instruments or simply good ol’ normal teamwork. Typically this implies pushing a field for the opposite to leap on, however different obstacles require quite advanced puzzle-solving.
Within the sport, Low and Alone search to flee the awful Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was restricted to one among these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus the place our small characters needed to sneak underneath the toes of grotesque, ambling staff (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the game of their fellows). After we thought we had been protected, possessed puppets sprinted after us till we may staff as much as knock their wood heads off and crush them. Being seen by anybody meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of quite ugly deaths.
It is this stress and the dour setting that units Little Nightmares 3 other than different co-op video games just like the extra excitable and dynamic Cut up Fiction launched earlier this yr, a rollercoaster flipbook of sport genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent expertise. In distinction, the part of Little Nightmares 3 I performed unfolded like a sequence of grim vignettes that depend on its pleasingly goth trappings as a lot as working collectively together with your pal (or pc teammate) to progress.
The creepy settings of Little Nightmares 3 have greater than a contact of the morbid and macabre.
Surviving your little nightmares
Whereas I bought solely an hour with the sport, Little Nightmares 3 appears to iterate on quite than innovate away from its predecessors: Count on extra of the identical in new, grotesque settings, simply with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For followers of the sequence, that is doubtless a very good factor. There’s not a lot else like Little Nightmares.
The Carnevale stage I performed by means of opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I because the masked Low (and somebody from Bandai Namco who kindly performed because the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us had been brutish manufacturing facility staff searching for escape on the funfair, which in a short time turned sinister as we very shortly noticed some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to seek out one employee in linked bins as the topic of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we needed to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I attempted, and failed, to disregard the viscera slopping out of the bins.
Whereas we hid from the human-size enemies, we needed to struggle the wood puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in a number of rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated our bodies whereas my teammate rushed ahead to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench.
However many of the rooms are about fixing puzzles, which may very well be so simple as transferring a field for my teammate to leap up and pull a change or work out how a radio performs into a posh answer. Whereas these quiet moments are a pleasant break from the tense fight or pursuit, in addition they give time to understand the macabre backgrounds: I ran previous one room with a circle of empty tall chairs solely to return again just a few seconds later to seek out them crammed with puppets, unmoving however watching.
Tense moments require sneaking and communication between gamers.
After which there are the actually, actually tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining sweet manufacturing facility (apparently the place all these brutes work) and as much as the places of work the place the boss works, to seek out him asleep with the TV droning on within the darkness…and his frankly hideous child nestled subsequent to him. Naturally, we needed to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I found we needed to scramble for a hiding place after making it previous the grate.
This was maybe essentially the most irritating a part of the preview as we panicked searching for an answer to our lethal woes (versus the gradual, methodical gameplay earlier) — however that is a part of the stress, particularly when including a teammate to the combination. Finally, it was a hard-won lesson in endurance. Within the subsequent room, a kitchen, the nightmarish child banged a bowl on the desk till the daddy walked over to a corpse (presumably his employee) and minimize out some meat for his ghoulish youngster to eat.
In my brief time with it, Little Nightmares 3 looks as if a cooperative spooky storybook for gamers and their buddies (however not sofa buddies, sadly — it is on-line co-op solely) to expertise. How a lot it lives as much as earlier video games within the sequence, particularly as developer Supermassive Video games takes extra of the reins from the franchise’s authentic creators Tarsier Video games, is anybody’s guess. (Tarsier’s comparable religious sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.)
However because the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it is the perfect time of the yr for a creepy co-op sport like Little Nightmares 3 to land.
Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Sequence X/S, Nintendo Swap and Nintendo Swap 2.
