By William Ludwig

With predecessors like Little Nightmares 1 and 2, this new installment into the franchise had pretty large shoes to fill—almost impossibly large. The first game was a massive success, proving that horror games can build suspense through their scale and story rather than just cheap jump scares and tense music.  Their second installment was no different, building on the first and expanding the scale even more—introducing new worlds, providing more lore and background on the characters, and finishing the story with a heartbreaking twist that the franchise became infamous for.

This third game capitalizes on the community feedback of the first two, allowing players to experience the game with a friend through either local or online co-op. A multiplayer option was something that everyone who played the first two games felt was the natural next step, given the second installment’s use of two main characters. Although only one of them was controlled by the player, the second was an NPC solely meant to help you progress through the game. With seemingly the entire fanbase calling for this feature, it was an easy slam dunk for the developers, and it instantly built hype for the game when co-op was announced back in 2023.

The production of the game, however, was not so smooth sailing. With the original developers, Tarsier Studios, selling the franchise to Supermassive Games for the third installment, people became wary of how well this new game would hold up to the others—if at all. Being the developers of games like The Quarry and Until Dawn, however, people held out hope that Little Nightmares 3 would still be a success—even with the game style being vastly different from their previous works.

So what happened? How did the game perform? Did it live up to its expectations? Well, yes and no. Like the first two, Little Nightmares 3 was visually stunning—bringing to life new worlds that perfectly fell into the themes of the original games while adding new lore and scenery within each environment. When playing the game, it’s hard not to fall into a trance by the detailed and stylized backgrounds while admiring the sheer scale and terror hidden within each scene. This third installment brought some new things to the table as well. Those being an umbrella for both characters,  a bow for one of the players, and a wrench for the other, allowing for fun and immersive gameplay with their well-known puzzles and chase scenes. And that’s pretty much it in terms of new additions and aspects that were better than the first installments.

The story was alright, but didn’t provide much lore or information on the characters. When playing the game, you could tell that underneath it was a very well-made and captivating story–but it was buried under endlessly tedious puzzles with little to no suspense to back it up. For a majority of the game, it’s as though there aren’t any real stakes involved. We don’t get to understand the villains or characters nearly as much as we should have. This left the ending feeling half-baked, with their twist ending not having as big an impact as it should have, even having clear intentions to connect the protagonists to the monstrous creatures through more than just fear, which ultimately were swept away. While the first two games benefit from their simple stories, here it just feels flat as a clear goal is no longer presented to the audience.

Overall, Little Nightmares 3 provides a fun and interactive experience for you and your friends that tries its best to be as thrilling as the first two installments. The fun factor, however, can only get players so far—leaving this third installment feeling disconnected, emotionally detached, and undercooked for a sequel to such a great duology. Even though this game has its fair share of negatives, they don’t far outweigh its positives, and vice versa. 

Sequels should be bigger, more impactful, more immersive—building on the faults of the previous instalments. However, instead of taking that step forward, Little Nightmares 3 stands still, playing it safe and even taking a step back in some regards, bringing me to a score of 6.5/10 for this third installment, compared to the other games, 8.8/10(Little Nightmares 1) and 9.5/10(Little Nightmares 2).