I love weird, atmospheric games with minimal dialogue, fun platforming, and puzzles to solve. ABZÛ and Sword of the Sea rank among my all-time favorites, and I’ve always wished for a game that felt similar, but a bit creepier. After years of being told I should try out Little Nightmares, I figured I might as well take the latest entry in the franchise — Little Nightmares 3 — out for a spin. After all, it has all the right ingredients: a spooky atmosphere, a story you have to piece together, and lots of puzzles and platforming. Even firing up my PlayStation 5 and seeing the game’s title screen had me excited — the musical score was haunting but beautiful, and I was excited to see what the horror experts at Supermassive Games had in store for me.
I went into the game expecting a fun little adventure in a world of nightmares. In reality, I got an irritating exercise in frustration that eventually drove me to put down the controller for good. Little Nightmares 3 is a misleading title, as my experience with the game was effectively one enormous, hours-long nightmare.
Credit where it’s due: Little Nightmares 3 has a plethora of accessibility options, and thank god for that, because I absolutely wouldn’t have made it past the first puzzle without highlighted outlines to show me which objects can be picked up or interacted with. You can also change the game’s signature font to something more readable, and turn up the brightness. But despite making use of all of these aids, I was still left in the dark — literally and figuratively.
Little Nightmares 3 has some gorgeous environments and visually striking set pieces, but it’s too darn dark to really see any of them, even with the brightness turned up. The game’s tutorial is also lacking — while most sequels these days attempt to be approachable to newcomers who may not have played previous titles, Little Nightmares 3 throws you in the deep end. The game is littered with items you can pick up and hold (or throw), none of which I would have seen if I hadn’t turned on object outlines. There are also collectible dolls you can pick up, but they don’t appear to go into any sort of inventory or codex, and are just as impossible to see without object outlines activated. Even with the flashlight, which you’ll pick up around the game’s midpoint, it’s difficult to see your surroundings, and even more difficult to make out what objects you’re meant to interact with or pick up.
The game’s visibility issues are at their worst during the platforming sections. Like previous entries in the series, Little Nightmares 3 has a 2.5D perspective — you’re mainly walking in a straight horizontal line, but can also move closer and further from the camera. Combined with the blinding darkness and odd camera position, it can be incredibly hard to tell where you are in relation to the ledge of a platform, which leads to lots of falls, many of which are lethal. It can also be difficult to tell where you are in relation to the game’s smaller enemies. If you’re playing as Low (one of the game’s two protagonists, who wields a wrench), you’ll have to get close enough to enemies that you’re basically touching them, otherwise your attacks will miss. But enemies can kill you in one shot, and the split-second you spend trying to make sure you’re in the right spot to land a hit gives enemies plenty of time to smack you down.
Puzzles manage to be both wildly simple and deeply frustrating. One early puzzle has you turn a crank to lower a platform, jump on said platform, and wait for your AI companion to pull the crank again to lift you up. The problem — aside from the fact that it’s often impossible to tell which parts of the environment are scenery, and which parts are interactable — is that there’s no indication when your companion is going to help you. Puzzle solutions involving your companion aren’t immediately obvious, because they spend most of their time not doing much of anything. Little Nightmares 3 does have online multiplayer, and is probably more enjoyable when both protagonists are being played by real humans. But there’s no couch co-op mode, which is especially unfortunate, because it would be great if you could tag a roommate, friend, or spouse in to replace your AI companion during these wait-and-see moments.
Most puzzle games show you the endpoint or goal, and it’s up to you to put together the pieces. Little Nightmares 3 just drops you into a pitch-black room and hopes you can figure out what to do next. But the puzzles aren’t actually challenging — they’re only difficult because you can’t see, have no idea where you’re trying to go, and will never know if the solution is entirely up to you, or if you’re meant to get a helping hand from your companion. The game’s controls are downright clunky, and one of the game’s best traversal gimmicks — an umbrella that allows you to float upwards over air vents — is abandoned once you get your hands on the near-useless flashlight.
Besides making players fumble around in the dark (a mechanic that can actually be done well if implemented with care), Little Nightmares 3′s biggest sin is that it’s not scary. It’s not even especially creepy. While the franchise isn’t known for jumpscares, previous entries seemed to pull off tension far more successfully, with levels that forced players to walk backwards while keeping their flashlights trained on enemies to prevent them from moving. Even getting caught and killed by enemies isn’t scary, just annoying, because Little Nightmares 3 depends entirely on a lack of light to set the mood. Unfortunately, that mood is more frustrating than fear-inducing, and worst of all, there’s nothing interesting waiting for you in the darkness.
