Many of us have recurring nightmares from time to time, whether it’s the one where you go to school naked, or the one where all your teeth fall out, or indeed the one where you go to school naked and all your teeth fall out. However, Little Nightmares 3 isn’t the kind of recurring nightmare that’s likely to keep you awake at night. Instead, this puzzle-platforming sequel feels like a surprisingly uninspired retread of the two shadow-soaked stories that preceded it, and its only noteworthy new addition, a co-op mode, doesn’t shake up the formula to any substantial degree. I went into Little Nightmares 3 steeling myself for a traumatic twilight trip scary enough to make me sit bolt upright in bed, but instead it left me feeling calm enough to roll over and hit the snooze button.

Little Nightmares 3’s journey through a sequence of dimly lit domains focuses on two entirely new and aptly named child leads, Low and Alone. You select which pint-sized protagonist you want to inhabit at the story’s outset, with the second hero controlled either by the AI – like Six was in Little Nightmares 2 – or by a second player in online co-op. The two leads share the same core abilities like jumping, crouch-walking, and grabbing objects, but they’re each equipped with a unique tool for puzzle-solving and the occasional brief burst of combat. Low has a bow that can be used to shoot ropes to drop crates or switches to move platforms, while Alone lugs around a giant wrench that she can use to smash through weakened walls or manipulate the controls of certain basic bits of machinery found in Little Nightmare 3’s twisted terrain.

However there’s little room for experimentation with either character’s unique action, since they are largely context sensitive – Low will typically only raise his bow to fire if there’s a target nearby that he needs to hit, for example – and puzzle solutions always seem pretty obvious as a result. Few of them require much in the way of coordinated combinations of the two characters’ abilities, and I never found myself getting hung up on a brainteaser in Little Nightmares 3 for anywhere near as long as I did when faced with some of the more challenging puzzles of its predecessor, which made it feel like I was just mindlessly going through the motions for most of the five-hour journey.

Nightmare Run

Unlike the tales of the first two Little Nightmares’ which each featured five chapters, Low and Alone’s story is split across only four: the sandswept sprawl of Necropolis; the creepy, lollipop-lined floors of the Candy Factory; the twisted, Tim Burton-esque big tops of Carnavale; and the somewhat generic hospital hallway horrors of The Institute. (There are apparently a further two chapters to come, but they will arrive at a later date as part of a paid expansion pass.) Low and Alone travel to each standalone setting using mirrors as portals, and while I won’t spoil why it is they’re trapped in these nightmare realms or exactly where they’re trying to get to, I will say that I found the unspoken bond that gradually develops between them to be surprisingly sweet, even if the story itself is ultimately pretty slight and not nearly as spooky as the previous two.

Of the four chapters on offer, Carnavale struck me as the most engaging to explore. There are all sorts of disgusting sights to sneak past in its dank depths lit by string lights and occasional flashes of lightning, from grotesquely overstuffed patrons smacking human pinatas with sticks and gorging themselves face down in straining slop buckets, to a particularly disturbing spin on the classic magician’s trick of sawing a man in half. It also features the most tense combat encounters in the entire adventure, as the diminutive duo is forced to team up against waves of wooden dolls styled like sideshow alley barkers, with Low knocking their heads off with a well-timed arrow and then frantically trying to avoid the clutches of their headless bodies, while Alone rushes in to club their discarded skulls with her wrench to terminate them for good.

Beyond this handful of memorable moments, though, Little Nightmares 3 is less of a frightening new beast and more of a familiar Frankenstein’s monster assembled with parts repurposed from the previous two games. The towering baby doll that looms large in the background of the Necropolis chapter like some sort of slack-eyed Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is certainly an intimidating sight to behold, but overcoming it is painfully straightforward – you simply need to time your movements to slink past it when its vision cone shifts like so many other stalkers in the series’ past. Remember timing your jumps in tandem on top of a trap door to crash your way down through to basement levels in Little Nightmares 2? Well, get ready to repeat that action several times over in Little Nightmares 3, along with regular stops to slowly rip the wooden beams off boarded-up doorways and push and pull crates in order to clamber up onto shelves. It all starts to feel a bit too repetitive long before you roll credits, which isn’t ideal for a story with a runtime so short it can be completed in a single late night session.

Umbrella Cooperation

There are a couple of additional tools that Low and Alone gain access to along the way that switch things up slightly. For the first two chapters, the plucky young pair is equipped with umbrellas that can be unfurled to either take advantage of updrafts and float up to out of reach platforms, or to cushion the fall from equally great heights, which adds a welcome wrinkle to the story’s otherwise strictly linear exploration. However, any interesting movement methods these parasols present are completely quashed at the story’s midpoint, when the umbrella is ditched in favour of a flashlight that has considerably less impact on the action. Sure, it illuminates your increasingly gloomy surroundings, but there’s never a time where it’s used as a tool for heightening the tension in any interesting ways. I still get chills thinking about that sequence in Little Nightmares 2 that involved desperately shining a flashlight to halt the march of prosthetically-limbed patients in its menacing hospital setting, but sadly there’s nothing nearly as terrifying as that here.

In fact, Little Nightmares 3 quickly settles into a fairly predictable rhythm of alternating between slow and steady stealth sections and urgent chase sequences, both plagued by instant fail outcomes that are at least mitigated somewhat by mostly generous checkpointing. Zero-tolerance terminations are nothing new in the series, of course – however, these swift deaths did highlight the occasionally idiotic behaviour of the partner AI this time around, like when an CPU-controlled Low kept shooting arrows as the same giant fly in the Necropolis that would fall and crush him, sending us back to the nearest checkpoint. For several frustrating repeated deaths, it proved to be a literal game-breaking bug.

AI issues can be avoided by playing through Little Nightmares 3 in co-op, of course, but although this new two-player mode has been touted as one of its most distinguishing features, it’s been implemented in a disappointingly limited fashion. For starters, co-op is online-only so you can’t play through the story with a friend on the couch beside you, which is a shame if, like me, you enjoy partnering up in games with your spouse or children. It also isn’t drop-in, drop-out, so if you start a game in co-op but your fellow adventurer decides they’re too creeped out to continue, you have to start the story over again in order to play solo, which seems like an entirely unnecessary restriction to impose.

Little Nightmares 3 does however offer a generous friend pass system similar to that of Split Fiction, allowing a second player to join you without them having to purchase their own copy of the game, but that’s pretty much where the comparisons with Hazelight Studios’ co-op epic end. Little Nightmares 3 can’t compete with Split Fiction’s consistently innovative brilliance in co-operative game design, nor the replay value it offers by featuring such widely contrasting experiences between its two playable characters. After finishing the campaign as Low, I immediately started again as Alone and was disappointed to find there was no meaningful difference between the two beyond one character’s ability to hit things and the other’s ability to shoot them.