Little Nightmares III (Switch 2) Review

It’s time for another nightmare as Little Nightmares III leaps out from the muck and the mire. There is a different studio onboard (with some returning staff), Supermassive Games. Supermassive are known for hits like Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology, so they have some horror credentials. Grab your torch and squint into the darkness as we take a look at Little Nightmares III.

Little Nightmares III follows two children and new protagonists for the series, Low and Alone, a boy and girl respectively. Each kid comes with their own ability for navigating the treacherous environment on this mysterious and dark journey. Low carries a bow for long-range attacks, cutting ropes and hitting distant buttons. Alone carries a wrench for smashing through barriers and crushing skulls. It is vital for the two to work together if they have any hope of surviving the horrors within the mirror portals.

The journey will take Low and Alone through ‘The Spiral’; a world in the ‘Nowhere’, looking to find their way back home. Starting with a (mostly) lifeless city, Necropolis, that is terrorised by a giant baby. Followed by a gooey Candy Factory with some unpleasant security, a Carnival for the bloated twisted fairgoers and more. Each main area is distinct, introducing a new evil antagonist to hunt you down until you escape or stop them. As with the previous games, the story is never explicitly explained for you. The environment and the Spiral’s inhabitants/victims do most of the heavy work. That said, the snippets of story do their job, keeping Low and Alone working their way through this warped world.

When I look back on playing the previous game, Little Nightmares II, it’s quick to see LN3 continues to bring back that constant suspense, building dread to the horrors that lurk in these worlds. The gross and grotesque inhabit every corner of the world. While there are still some jumps and tense frantic run-ins with enemies, LN3 feels like there’s less than there was previously. Now it’s not necessarily a negative; in LN2, the game really dragged in places around action and stealth sequences that got bogged down in some iffy controls/physics as enemies hounded you.

In LN3, it feels like the counterbalance is to lean into piling on the atmosphere. Across the four or more hours (if you want to collect everything), LN3 just keeps from overstaying its welcome.

If you’re a fan of the Little Nightmare series, there is lots to like here. As a puzzle platformer horror game, it seamlessly sidles up to the previous titles and brings more of the creepy settings for the minuscule protagonists to survive. I have no doubt there’s a lot of lore about the locations and antagonists.

There are still some of the same little nightmares, or maybe tiny disturbances. For example, if you’re caught or hit by anything at any point in the game, it’s still an instant fail, swiftly respawning you at a nearby checkpoint. I get it, it’s hardly a major issue and is pretty par for the course with these games. On the positive side, the respawns are rarely that far away; if it’s not in the same room/space, it’s usually in a safe spot a room or two away. However, this still gets frustrating when you have to repeat a sequence, often when you’re most likely to get killed a few times as you work out where you need to go. More annoying still is when part of the sequence involves stealth, making for a slow retry.

The game has been built with co-op in mind, with a few caveats. The co-op is online only, and as per Namco Bandai’s website, the game needs to be played and completed with the same players. This means you won’t be able to hop between co-op and solo play on the same save. This is a bit of a letdown if you didn’t intend on playing all the way through with them. There is a Friends Pass that will be out at launch, although it wasn’t available at the time of review. As with previous ‘friend pass’ titles, it allows you to play with a friend with only one copy of the game. With the limitations of being able to play co-op for this review, I can’t report on how well it all works online. Having played solo with the game AI controlling the other character, I can safely say that the game works well enough without another player on board.

I have no doubt that there will be some differing opinions on the co-op. For LN3, it feels like it could be a fun time running around the Spiral with a friend. Although I’m kind of surprised that there has been an emphasis on co-op, as it feels like the game fumbles with making it a preferred way to experience the game. In a way, as a result of making both solo and co-op viable options, both modes suffer a little. At times throughout the story, the AI-controlled character will interact with the environment in a way that indicates the two characters should share a moment together, but there’s no way to interact with them like it might if it was solo focused. Then, on the other side of the coin, the game feels like it doesn’t do enough with the two kids’ differing abilities to give two players enough to have to coordinate. Most of the time, it’s needing both kids to push a door, hold open a vent opening, or maybe push something. Ultimately, it doesn’t impact the game in any real way; it was an enjoyable time playing it solo, and the AI-controlled character did what they were meant to.

As a quick disclaimer, the version of LN3 I have played has not received the Day One patch, so please keep in mind that your experience might vary. On the Switch 2, LN3 ran just fine, whether in handheld or docked. Although without all the technical comparisons or having the other platform versions to compare, I can’t give you a deep dive. Due to the visual style of the game, it’s also made a little more difficult to pick apart too much as well. In this, LN3 does well with maintaining its gloomy and stylised look, full of slick and slimy globs and guts and other horrible things to creep you out. Character movement is intended to appear as if the game was animated like stop motion, which appears to have served the game well to maybe hide any frame rate dropping. The characters and creatures within the world look like they’ve been made and sculpted with clay or sewn together. The visual style, with the film grain and deliberately gloomy settings, definitely helps to hide any visual or performance issues. Visually, the series has still got it with nailing the tense and dread-filled nightmarescapes, with the Necropolis and Carnival being standouts for me.

I also wanted to mention the sound; as with the previous games, it does a lot with very little. The music throughout the game remains understated, if it is there at all, leaving the player to hear all of the things that go bump in the night, all the slimy, clicky, inhuman sounds. All this draws even more focus to when there is some music, often signifying something as the story keeps moving on.

Little Nightmares III continues to deliver on gross, slimy and twisted horrors. This creepy adventure manages to keep the scenery fresh enough the third time around, while still feeling familiar in good ways. If you liked the previous games, then you’re likely to enjoy diving in, even if this title is a little more of a slow burn than its predecessor. If this is your first nightmare, it’s a good jumping in point too.

Rating: 4/5