The Little Nightmares series has become a favourite amongst fans of grotesque horrors. The puzzle platformer has that grim and grimy aesthetic, with that unnerving need to constantly hide from the unnervingly large and terrible inhabitants of these worlds. While you had an AI-controlled partner through Little Nightmares 2, and can continue to play solo in its upcoming sequel, Little Nightmares 3 will finally let you share these horrors with another person.
I asked Little Nightmares III Producer Coralie Feniello about taking this jump, and how co-op can share out and maybe reduce the horror. “That’s something we thought about at the beginning,” she said, “would it be as scary playing co-op? I think it’s just a different atmosphere, a different vibe, but it’s not like removing the fear from what I’ve seen. Sometimes people tend to just have a lot of empathy together and to just feel the fear from the other one, so it’s kind of a balance at the end. But it is quite different because sometimes you will laugh, sometimes you will have fear. When you play alone – I mean, single player – you will keep a bit more immersed in the atmosphere, like the sound will be kicking in more and things like that.”
There’s a pair of new characters found within Little Nightmares 3, as Low with his beaked mask, cape and bow, and Alone with her tufts or red hair, green jumpsuit and wrench journey through the Nowhere and a spread of different realms found within. Once again, their journey will be told wordlessly, but as Coralie said, “More is not always better. We wanted to tell a lot of things to everyone, and then we realised that it’s not working like that in speechless stories. We want to tell very impactful story points at different points of the game and then all the complexity of that all goes in the environment. We do know that fans tend to have a lot of theories and so they will enjoy and see what’s going on in the environments, but everyone should have something at the end.”
Our hands-on came while playing through a section known as Carnivale, which is dark and depressing for more reasons than just the lashing rain that’s pouring down as we visit. The first thing that surprises, as we find ourselves washed up on a sea shore at the start of the demo, is that we’re not bound together by a shared screen space. With co-op being exclusively online, Little Nightmares 3 avoids that co-op game conundrum of whether to allow for split screen or keep characters together within view of the screen, and so instead lets you both meander and view the world entirely independent of one another. It’s an interesting choice that does allow for more freedom when exploring the scenes presented to you.
“That’s also one of the reasons why we are online co-op and not couch,” Coralie revealed, “because we didn’t want it at all to have a split screen. In Little Nightmares, each room is, I would say, like a frame […] each room comes from craftsmanship and each room has a lot of details and we do want each room to be seen in full screen. I think that’s super important with the camera view.”
It doesn’t take long to reach the carnival itself, with hunched over visitors to the carnival having little real interest in you – they’re far more concerned with having what looks like an absolutely fantastic time! Sure, they’re tightly wrapped up in coats to withstand the rain, and the crowds are a bit thick to get anywhere all that quickly, but there’s plenty of greasy looking food, all these lit up tents to visit, rides to spin around on, tubs for apple bobbing – try not to drown, though! – and the odd pinata to smack with a stick. Sure, it might not actually be a pinata, and really just be the upended corpse of a former guest, but when you’re blindfolded, what’s the difference? I guess there’s fewer sweets that come out… It’s all delightfully dark and twisted.
I really enjoyed the almost incidental fun and games that I could engage with as well, playing as Low with the bow and arrow. There were plenty of balloons to target and pop with a quick auto-aimed arrow shot, but then there was also a pop-up target carnival game that I spent a good few minutes trying to best. Surprise surprise, it was rigged so that even just hitting three targets in time needed frame-perfect precision, though Coralie claimed that it’s technically possible to win…
But Alone isn’t left out from these interactions. Coralie said, “It depends on the chapters! I think from the Necropolis to the first one, you find things things to break on the ground that got a bit more, like pottery and things like that. So that’s kind of fun as well. But yeah, I think the long distance off Low makes it a bit more satisfying on the side for an environmental stuff, but also Alone gets to open secret doors. At some points when you have some hidden collectables, it’s usually behind secret walls that Alone can break.”
Journeying through this together, there’s some classic two-player puzzles to work through. You’ll have to collaborate to push and pull heavy objects; one player will have to boost the other up and over to reach a switch or movable object; one person pulls a lever to move a platform for the other, with a second lever or new path that they can later access. It’s familiar on a pure gameplay level, but wrapping it up in that grimy Little Nightmares aesthetic and having the ability to explore independently gives it a distinctive feel and tone.
That’s accentuated in moments where combat comes to the fore. In many situations, your only option is to sneak as quietly as possible and hide, the much larger beings of this world keen to hunt down the pointy white little Nomes and other small people as quickly as possible. But there are moments of combat as well, bringing the bow and wrench to the fore. You still need to work in tandem to get through these moments, as creepy animated dolls spring to life and come after you. Low can get in the first strike, a crack shot to knock off their head, but the body keeps on coming, needing you to lure it away so that Alone can finish the job by whacking the noggin into the floor once and for all. It’s satisfying, and I’m keen to see how other enemies and combat moments come together.
It was a key point for the team to build around, Coralie said: “Earlier Little Nightmares games already had some little combat with pipes and stuff that you find in the environment. Here, we really wanted to use the cooperation to be able to bring that to the players and also bring some gameplay that will be time dependent – basically, you need to do something and the other one has to do something kind of at the same time.
“Something that we’ve seen with the play is that for a lot of players, it’s way harder to play in multiplayer than in single player for that, because you could mess up in single player, but the AI will not, and if you are in multiplayer, both of you can mess up, so it’s like twice the risk of not being able to do it! But that’s really fun to see, I think.”
This is still thoroughly Little Nightmares, keeping so much of the tone and feel of the first two games, from the dank visuals to the trial and error sometimes needed to figure your way past deadly monstrosities. Sharing this with another person does change that in that always enjoyable fashion. You’re joking and wise-cracking as you go, conferring to figure out puzzles, taking turns to apologise for messing up a particular encounter. For me, it does lighten the horror a bit, but if that’s what you demand from Little Nightmares then, well, you don’t have to play together…
