Little Nightmares III

I came into Little Nightmares III ready to be creeped out and left feeling mostly fine, which is not exactly the response a horror game is shooting for. Supermassive Games, better known for Until Dawn and The Quarry, took over from original developer Tarsier Studios, and the handover is competent without ever being inspired. The atmosphere is intact, the art direction is still doing genuinely unsettling things with scale and shadow, and the sound design will make you uneasy in all the right ways. That much is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether any of this adds up to something worth your time if you have already played the first two. The headlining addition this time is online co-op, the first in the series. You and a friend take control of Low and Alone, two new protagonists with asymmetric toolsets: Low carries a bow for hitting distant switches and cutting ropes from range, while Alone wields a wrench for forcing open barriers and cranking mechanisms. On paper, that asymmetry should produce interesting puzzles. In practice, reviewers broadly agree that both tools are underutilized for most of the runtime, with the more demanding co-op set pieces concentrated toward the later chapters. A lot of what you actually do is walk, climb, and push boxes. The chase sequences still spike the pulse, and a handful of enemy encounters are genuinely well-staged, but the middle sections drag in a way that feels like a design that was stretched to fit two players without being fully rethought for them. The co-op implementation itself comes with some real friction points worth knowing before you commit. There is no local play at all: even if you and your co-op partner are sitting in the same room, you both need to be online and on the same platform, because crossplay is not supported. No crossplay means PC players can only pair with other PC players, which narrows your pool. The Friend's Pass is a genuinely good call, letting one owner invite a partner who downloads a free version to play the full campaign, so you are not forced into two purchases. But matchmaking has reportedly been unstable at launch, and there is no built-in voice chat, so budget for a Discord call if you want smooth coordination. AI companion solo play works acceptably as a fallback, though the AI occasionally glitches during boss encounters. As a pure horror adventure, the game runs roughly six to eight hours, structured across four chapters set in locations like a decaying necropolis, a grotesque carnival, and other corners of the Spiral. Each area is visually distinct and consistently well-dressed. The problem is that the series formula is showing its age: depth perception issues affect platforming in ways the previous games also struggled with, and the enemy AI feels less dynamically threatening than in prior entries, arguably because designing a stalking predator that works against two active players is a hard problem Supermassive did not fully solve. The Metacritic user score sitting around 5.7 reflects a fanbase that showed up for something special and found something decent. For series fans who have a specific co-op partner lined up and both on PC, this is a passable evening or two in a world that still has strong bones. If you are a solo player, the AI makes the game functional but you will feel the co-op scaffolding constantly. If you have not played Little Nightmares I or II, start there; the atmosphere hits much harder when the formula is still fresh.

Fred · Scout Team

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