If the last two decades have shown us anything, it’s that Gamers™ love a good sequel. Which is actually true, most people who play video games enjoy quality follow-ups to games they liked playing. It’s also true that risk-averse publishers love to push sequels out the door because they’re safer bets and people will probably buy them anyway, usually. So here’s Little Nightmares III, the unexpectedly risky third installment in a beloved series, given that it’s made by a new studio and that it adds cooperative play, and you would be right to wonder which type of “good sequel” this one is.
You have to start with what made the first two Little Nightmares games good. They jumped on a formula popularized by Limbo and INSIDE; the eerie, unsettling 2D side-scrolling environmental puzzle game that lacks a convenient genre term but is immediately distinctive. This type of game usually instills a constant sense of foreboding that lurks at the fringes of your awareness until tension mounts to a crescendo right before a mysterious giant spider leg or death trap slices your head off, but the thing that really makes that tension work is the way it rises and falls throughout, giving you moments to breathe and relax in between the extra sweaty bits.
Little Nightmares I & II took this formula and dropped you into a world of miniature horrors that feels loosely adjacent to something Tim Burton might think up but with the whimsy and black and white stripes dialed way down. Those games managed to keep things light and fun while operating within a similar framework, in which you, a small thing clad in a yellow raincoat, have to survive your way through horrors folksy, eldritch, and foreign alike.
Part of the fun was seeing the various sources of cultural inspiration these games would draw from to create memorable explorations of familiar scary story tropes, and feeling that ebb and flow of tension in your exploration, as well as a lot of fun and clever environmental puzzles throughout. Above all, those games were somehow incredibly charming throughout, enough to make even the most dread-inducing moments fun.
Little Nightmares III aims to take all of that, recreate a similar but also brand new experience, sprinkle in co-op, and hit the same highs as its predecessors, all under the guidance of a new team.
If you want to hook an audience, you need something enticing and memorable to start with, something that gives players a reason to push through their uncertainty and give things a chance. I suppose maybe Supermassive Games assumed that co-op itself might be that hook, because the opening of Little Nightmares III is a slow burn. While the design choices seem to have been clearly grounded in helping players ease into the new setting and the new co-op mechanics, the early puzzles and traversal are so unchallenging as to be wholly un-engaging, and my first session with game was spent mostly with Scott and I trying to figure out where to go because of unclear progression cues. That, and a lot of dying and reloading.
When we did reach a point where we started finding more challenge and interesting environmental interaction while evading an enemy with a bright headlamp for eyes that would crush you if it spotted you across several different screens, we found ourselves testing the bounds of the game’s movement controls and our patiences alike.
Death and dying and failure states in a Little Nightmares game are not new concepts, but restarts in previous games were fast. In Little Nightmares III with a co-op partner in a totally separate geographic location (one time zone away in our case), restarts were a massive pain and source of friction. If the guest/second player in your session dies, they can simply respawn, but if the host/primary player dies, it’s a full failure state and you reset to the last checkpoint. The rest times for that experience are noticeably long, on the order of as much as 10 seconds, presumably while the session is negotiated between host and clients.
In 2025, that kind of a delay feels extremely hard to swallow, especially on well-specced PCs with gigabit or greater internet connection speeds on both ends. Our pre-release build may have had some net code bugs that have since been worked out, but it made our session turn into a bit of a drag, combined with persistent session connectivity issues that sometimes forced us to restart our games to reconnect. Needless to say, those kinds of technical issues really suck the tension out of a situation and therefore undermine pretty much everything happening on screen. Moreover, this also takes all the fun right out of the co-op experience.
Combining technical issues with a greatly reduced lack of challenge, or at least a lack of puzzles designed to give you little dopamine hits and feelings of being clever even if they’re easy, which were prevalent throughout the first two games, makes Little Nightmares III a much more difficult recommendation than its predecessors. Sure, there are creepy vibes at least, and some of the charm is still hanging around, but you can feel that this game has some new DNA informing its composition.
Supermassive has a known pedigree making horror games, so the sensible thing is to trust them, but Little Nightmares is such a different type of game from its usual outings and is so much less cinematic and story driven than titles like The Quarry or The Dark Pictures Anthology that it’s understandable that adapting to a more environmentally driven story could be a challenge. It’s also unclear which team within Supermassive worked on this game, so it’s hard to say if it’s even fair to compare Little Nightmares III with the studio’s other offerings on any level.
If you are looking for some fun/creepy vibes to cap off Spooky Season, Little Nightmares III is at least serviceable in this regard. If the technical issues have been resolved, so much the better, and it’ll be at least a decently fun shared experience with a friend or sibling or significant other, although even at $40 it’s tough to look you straight in the face and say you’ll feel that your money was well spent.
I can’t help but come away from my time with Little Nightmares III disappointed given what the series has offered in the past. I genuinely hope this isn’t the last we see of these games, but if there is another installment, I think Supermassive or the next team would do well to revisit what made the first games so successful and unique in the first place.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
