Little Nightmares 3 review – Good ideas, middling execution

The vibes in Little Nightmares 3 are immaculate. It’s dark and gloomy with weird, twisted, Tim Burton-esque visual design that is both gross and weirdly cute. If vibes alone could carry a game, then this would be an easy 10/10. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to a game than just vibes, and Little Nightmares 3 stumbles a lot more than it should. 

There are two ways to play Little Nightmares 3: solo, with an AI controlling the second character, or in online co-op. I chose the latter, mostly because I enjoy playing co-op games with friends and loved ones, but in hindsight, I do wonder if playing solo with an AI partner would have been a better choice. Not because my playmate was bad at the game, but because it’s probably a lot easier to get through a game like this with a character that always knows what to do, where to stand, and how to progress. 

Little Nightmares 3 follows two young children, a boy called Low and a girl called Alone, as they venture through weird, nightmarish lands. These lands are quite diverse and interesting – there’s a carnival, a processing office filled with filing cabinets, the home of a hostile old man and his demon baby/puppet/dog – although they tend to become a lot more homogenous in the back half of the game. 

A lot of what happens in the story is left up to interpretation. That’s fine in a lot of games – Silent Hill f was the same, and that was fantastic – but it only really works if you’re actually invested in interpreting it. I had my own ideas about what the story meant after having played through it, but it hasn’t lingered long in my head after the credits rolled. 

It’s not that the story isn’t interesting, because it mostly is. It’s wrapped in metaphor and dream logic, simultaneously dense and devoid of information — but it doesn’t feel like it really matters at all. These two kids, for whatever reason, are traipsing through a nightmarish series of levels, hopping into mirrors in between, with occasional cutaways to what I assume is the “real world,” and that’s all you really need to know. It’s fine, and people who enjoy it will spend hours discussing it with those who feel similar, but it’s a loose framework that’s there solely to facilitate the nightmarish world. 

The gameplay fares a little better, but it’s bogged down by way too much jank that gets in the way of it ever being great. Whoever is playing as Alone has to occasionally get out a wrench to hit both environmental objects and enemies alike, but the positioning has to be just right, else you miss and end up getting both players killed. Playing as Low is a lot better, with a bow that automatically locks on to anything you can shoot, but puzzles that use either of these mechanics are few and far between. 

It’s when both players have to do something in tandem that most of the jank rears its head. Actions that should be simple, like opening a door together or one player hoisting the other to a higher platform, have to be perfectly positioned, otherwise the animations just don’t activate, or they attempt to but it bugs out, leaving you both to reposition and try again. And again. Some of this might be down to playing on Australian internet, where the connection was sometimes iffy and occasionally desynced a little bit, but a lot of it is just jank inherent to the game. Sometimes the ladder-holding button would just stop working, or climbing a ledge would require positioning way too precise for this kind of game. 

These minor animation and positioning bugs wouldn’t be so bad on their own, but they’re often the difference between succeeding and getting caught by an enemy and dying, which brings its own issues. The checkpointing in Little Nightmares 3 is frustrating, with checkpoints located close enough to the action that it’s never too far to get back into it, but just far enough away that you need to slowly make your way back, often multiple times, enduring slow and frustrating animations and loading screens along the way. 

Huge sections of the game are far too punishing, too. One section in particular, roughly halfway through the game, has you waiting for a dog-like creature to feed so you can creep towards a new hiding spot. Once you’re there, you have to wait through the long feeding sequence again before you can move forward to yet another hiding spot. If you time it poorly, or if you take a single walking step instead of a creeping step, you’ll get caught and have to start over. 

Chase sequences have the same problem, though mercifully most are checkpointed right at the start of the chase, rather than just before it. These sequences are a nice idea in theory – you and your co-op partner are running away from an enemy, making pathing decisions on the fly – but they’re way too tightly tuned. If one player bumps into another, it could set that player back half a pace, which almost always results in a game over. A single stumble on a janky bit of geometry or a bad pathing decision shoots you right back to the start of the chase, with no flexibility or allowances at all. You either get it perfectly right, or you do it again. 

The environmental puzzles are by far the best part of the game, if you ignore all the jank that’s inherent to moving around the world. I enjoyed figuring out where to go and what to do, how to get a key without getting spotted or how to approach communication and skill sets when you’re forced to split up. 

These puzzles also sometimes feature some really clever mechanics, like an umbrella that lets you gracefully float to the ground or rise up in an updraft, or an item you can hold that completely changes the layout of the world in a bubble around you. Either of these could be a permanent part of the players’ movesets, which would allow for much more complex and satisfying puzzling, but they’re used for a couple of rooms and then discarded promptly after. You also, rarely, have to shoot items in the world or shout out to make noise and distract an enemy or NPC, so your partner can reach another part of the area, or you can quickly sneak around them. Another nice idea, but it’s used maybe twice in the entire runtime. 

That’s the biggest problem with Little Nightmares 3: it has a lot of nice ideas, but the execution is lacking. Sometimes it doesn’t do enough of the good things it does, and sometimes it does way too much of the bad things. It’s a game that, with a bit more time, a lot more polish, and a clearer direction, could be great — but as it stands, it’s just a little too janky, a little too underbaked, and a little too frustrating.