Preview | What Little Nightmares III’s Co-Op Lacks in Scares, It Makes Up for in Joy
Recently, I attended a preview event for Little Nightmares III, where I played the game co-op with a friend. Little Nightmares III is both the first entry in the series designed for co-op — though it’s worth noting that you can play the game solo with an AI companion — as well as the first to be developed by Supermassive Games (after Tarsier Studios, which developed the first two games, was acquired by Embracer Group, it moved on from the franchise, which is owned by publisher Bandai Namco). As would be expected for the third entry in a series, much of the conversation surrounding the game will entail comparisons to its progenitors. Unfortunately, neither myself nor my co-op partner have any experience with previous two games, so my experience of Little Nightmares III is as a total newcomer.
In Little Nightmares III, you play as characters Low, a boy with a crow mask and a bow, and Alone, a girl in a boiler suit with an oversized wrench. In order to escape from a terrifying place called the Spiral, they must work in tandem to solve puzzles and avoid monstrous creatures much larger than themselves.
The section I played through, the Carnavale, was made up of a few major set-piece puzzles, separated by minor traversal puzzles. While the majority of the minor puzzles were fairly self explanatory and fluid, the major puzzles were much less intuitive, seemingly requiring several failed attempts to arrive at a solution. From my time with the game, I truly don’t know if this is poor puzzle design, or if this kind of puzzle design is necessary for Little Nightmares to do what it’s best at. If the puzzles were more intuitive, and players were consistently successful on the first attempt, they wouldn’t get to see all the fun ways they can be butchered (or get their friends butchered) by Supermassive’s excellently creepy creatures.
These kinds of puzzles really come down to vibes. They fail if the fact that you have to die a set number of times before you can succeed becomes obvious to players, which is essentially impossible to predict as experiences will vary massively. Luckily, Little Nightmares III has a way of making the deaths fun, even after the shock and spectacle wear off: humour.
It’s no secret that horror and comedy are closely tied. They both rely heavily on timing, surprise, and tension. This crossover can be exploited in horror to play with audience expectations or relieve tension. Alternatively, if handled poorly, unintentional comedy can shatter any tension or immersion. Luckily, in Little Nightmares III, the humour feels intentional, at least in co-op mode. The truth is, watching your buddy get brutally murdered due to your fuckup is funny. This is the space that widely successful games like Lethal Company and R.E.P.O. are entirely built around, and I’m confident that Little Nightmares III will entertain fans just as much.
Unfortunately, as a result, Little Nightmares III loses the chance of conveying eeriness, at least in co-op, as players will fill quiet moments with their own chatter. The linearity and 2.5D perspective of the game also means it can’t pull off the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too trick of using proximity chat to enable those quieter eerie moments even in co-op. Similarly, I never felt personally vulnerable, something I imagine is common to previous games in the series owing to your littleness. Instead, any personal vulnerability came from how quickly you can fail, and the fact my buddy was relying on me not to fuck up.
More humour comes from just how much of a nuisance you can be. There are plenty of empty bottles and other junk you can throw at walls (or ideally people), to break and make a mess for no other reward than your own sick pleasure. Moreso, several puzzle solutions in the demo included some amount of pestering the Big Nightmares in your way. The game reminded me of a scene in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, where Bean completely destroys his caravan in response to the antics of the protagonists. This kind of needless rage is how many of the creatures respond to your inconveniences in Little Nightmares III — only more murderous. A slightly disproportionate response that only makes the situation funnier, like how trying not to laugh when someone is getting chewed up by a teacher only makes the laughter inevitable.
There’s a degree of clunkiness to the way Low and Alone control. A slight delay turning corners and a slower weightier jump add just enough resistance to movement to introduce uncertainty when avoiding monsters and traps. Holding each character’s weapon restricts you from jumping; there was no tutorial for this in the demo so for a while we thought the jump was unresponsive, but there may well be a tutorial for the mechanic in the final version. Silly fumbles that lead to deaths were exciting and funny for the preview, but I can certainly imagine these kinds of failures getting frustrating for a full playthrough.
On the whole, though, I’m looking forward to playing through the full game with a pal when it releases. If the preview was representative of the full game, Little Nightmares III certainly looks to join the recent pantheon of co-op experiences like It Takes Two, with the dark humour of other horror co-op games thrown in for good measure. One thing I haven’t really touched on here, is the feeling I got that playing the game singleplayer will be a wildly different experience to the one I had. I caught glimpses of a tense, solo experience, one where you can get a greater appreciation for the game’s sound design, and are able to see Low and Alone as characters, rather than just avatars for you and your mate. When the game releases, I can see arguments starting regarding the “real” way to play the game — ones I shall be ignoring while I get my friends torn apart with a big smile on my face.
