Nightmares

While waiting for Little Nightmares 3 to arrive, I went back and replayed the first two games, and I was reminded just how much creepier the first one is than its sequel. The Janitor, with his sinisterly stretched arms that could seemingly reach the silent protagonist, Six, wherever she hid, was the stuff of children’s night terrors. The chefs, with their unsettling fleshy masks, taunted me with the truth that was veiled behind them. It’s a reveal the game never offers, leaving my imagination to run wild. The second game was still one I enjoyed very much, but it felt like Tarsier Studios had toned down some of the grotesque, haunting displays in the sequel. It failed to create memorable villains on par with the original. Little Nightmares 3 changes hands to the horror veterans at Supermassive Games, and though the addition of co-op is a great fit, it feels similarly sanitized and overly familiar at times. It’s as though it looked to the sequel more than the original for the blueprint.

Little Nightmares 3, like the previous games, is a cinematic horror-platformer, now newly built for two players–or one player and an AI companion. Without loading screens or virtually any prompts on the screen, it’s extremely immersive, dropping you into a world that runs on nightmare fuel. Both this game’s story and the broader universe are purposely vague, and this has always been the series’ best attribute. Scurrying through dark apartments, rundown schools, foggy beaches, and haunted libraries nails the intent to present the world as an ever-present threat that is effective not just because it looks and sounds scary or because you’ll reliably find yourself dashing away from monsters.

Instead, the world itself is so hard to grasp, operating on dream logic, like someone has extracted the real memories of kids’ nightmares and put them into a game. This means every creepy encounter with its monsters of different shapes and sizes always comes with bewilderment. What is this, and how do I evade it? The rules of the world are always changing, and with uncertainty comes fear.

Little Nightmares 3’s addition of co-op is a seamless, welcome change.

It’s as though every monster you encounter in the game picks at that nagging fear in the back of a child’s mind as they drift off to sleep. What if there really is something in the closet? What if that pile of clothes on the chair, somewhat humanoid in shape, is someone out to get me? What if those bumps in the night are more than a creaky house? From an audio and visual perspective, Little Nightmares 3 is incredible. It really ought to be played with headphones on because there’s an amazingly layered audio experience not to be missed. Echoes of ghosts cry out in darkened rooms, creaks and metal clanking rhythmically leave you wondering if what you’re hearing is a building settling or a monster stalking.

This third game in the series uses less music than the others, which I found disappointing given the series’ effective use of twisted lullaby-like tunes in the past. You can hear one in the main menu, but during the game, music is seldom heard outside of heart-pounding chase scenes.

Because the series’ platforming has always relied on physical space that lets you move through not just the X and Y axes, but also the Z axis, each area has a depth to it that invites some minor exploration and works itself into the puzzle-solving. You’ll sometimes find yourself not running left to right away from nightmarish creatures nipping at your heels, but instead running toward or away from the camera. These frequent shake-ups of perspective aren’t new to the series, but they once more help Little Nightmares 3 keep you on your toes like past games have done so well.

This depth of scenery still creates some issues, however. Like before, it can sometimes be hard to make a crucial jump or even step on a creaky floorboard acting as a makeshift bridge. Depth perception is made tricky given the game’s camerawork, though, like Little Nightmares 2, the game does well to keep you on narrow platforms if you make the right first step. The original game was happy to let you fall off, but this threequel benefits from the fix the middle game brought to the series.

It’s not without several villains, but Little Nightmares 3 can’t reach the heights of the original’s memorable monsters.

The more frequent issue, seen not just throughout this game but the series, is its way of demanding perfection in its chase scenes. If ever a monster is barreling toward you–and this is not uncommon–you’ll often need to execute perfect evasions through multiple rooms or areas, not missing jumps, not slowing down, and performing any puzzle mechanics without delay. In the co-op structure of Little Nightmares 3, this becomes an even more pronounced necessity–and possibly a greater frustration as a result. That’s because its characters, Low and Alone, each have a unique gameplay function, so you’ll find yourself relying on your partner not to mess up their role in any situation.

Low has a bow and arrow that can be used to shoot buttons out of reach, split threadbare ropes, or even occasionally pierce enemy weak spots. Alone comes equipped with a heavy wrench that they can use to turn mechanisms, smash through some walls and objects, or clobber enemies. Little Nightmares 3 still isn’t a game that has you fighting back like a survival-horror title. Instead, combat is limited to moments in which it is the solution to an environmental puzzle, like one instance where creepy puppets are chasing you across a dark carnival; Low shoots their heads off their shoulders, while Alone pulverizes those heads while the decapitated bodies continue to give chase.

Moments like these tap into the same panicked terror the series is known for, but one wrong move means resetting, and while checkpoints are almost always generous, some encounters take on the feeling of trial-and-error frustrations as you and your partner work out a solution. This is actually less of an issue in solo mode, because the AI partner is adept at doing what it needs to do, sometimes even initiating a solution before you may have figured it out yourself, like shooting a button you hadn’t even noticed yet, tucked away in shadows.

Though co-op can add some annoyances, overall, the game is better off for having it. When Little Nightmares 2 featured some scenes in which an AI partner helped you solve puzzles much like those seen in this newest game, it seemed like co-op could be a seamless transition, and Little Nightmares 3 makes good on that expectation. I don’t think it takes away from the horror of it either, because of that reliance on your buddy to hold up their end of the bargain. Twitchy, anxious moments that this series hands out in droves are sometimes made better by having a friend by your side, like creeping through a haunted house together, clutching one another with a tight, fearful hug.

Part of the reason co-op works so well is that the language of the series–how you explore, how you solve puzzles–isn’t altered in any major way, for better or worse. With minor tweaks to the puzzles’ mechanics, it’s easy to imagine how almost anything you experience in Little Nightmares 3 could’ve been experienced before in past games. This, combined with Little Nightmares 3’s lack of especially memorable monsters of its own, places this game somewhere in the range of the last one, with both of them staring up at the best-in-series original. I have no doubts that people who liked the other two Little Nightmares games will also like this one, as it hits all the notes. Its issue is that it does not often play many new or especially spectacular notes.

You’ll see more of the world than ever before, thanks to Little Nightmares 3’s pacing being a bit faster than the past two.

The game moves through the world more quickly than past games, which tended to slow down as you’d solve multi-room puzzles for many minutes at a time. Supermassive has both the skills and apparent intent to show off more of the world and that’s one welcome, albeit somewhat subtle, change that I adored.

But it’s the game’s Little Nightmares 2-like focus on enemies such as wooden dolls and plastic dummies that ultimately sanitizes things in the way the fleshy, goopy first game never did. I can’t chalk it up to the change in studio, as Tarsier itself had already pulled back in this way with the previous game. Still, it’s odd to see the series avoid those especially nasty displays reminiscent of the original in favor of something that feels more restrained. It feels like the team has consciously avoided those elements. This isn’t a gateway horror game, though. There are sights and sounds here that are still the stuff of nightmares, as they should be. But if you were looking to play them by saving the scariest of them for last, you should not start here.

Little Nightmares 3 is faithful to the series under its new leading studio at Supermassive Games. The team, already a well-respected name in horror, carries Tarsier’s torch well, though it sometimes feels too deferential to the past games, failing to raise the bar both in puzzle and monster design. This is a good sequel that I’m glad to have made the time for, but if there’s to be another trip into this world of tiny terrors, it’ll first need a refill of nightmare fuel.

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