Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I used a person’s bisses of a person to solve a puzzle, obtained a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a disturbed baby. As a 2-feet high young woman trying to survive the morbid dangers of one denim after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I only sampled the first two games of small nightmares, but in my brief overview of Little Nightmares 3, it looked like a refined version of the premise of the series: the small protagonists endangered by a large dark world filled with traps to escape, puzzles to resolve and horrible and horrible and horrible enemies to be overcome. Take the scale of the animated horror film 9, mix it with the darkest of the Maudlin parameters of the director Henry Selick and let the players enjoy the haunting stroll, the room of the perilous room.

This time, players are not alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by supermassive games, two players (or one and a companion AI) choose between low characters (a masked boy with a bird with an arc) and alone (a girl with a combination and a key), who count the others and leave the rooms using their unique tools or just a good fashionable team job. Sometimes it means pushing a box so that the other jumps, but other obstacles require a fairly complex puzzle resolution.

In the game, the stockings and only seek to escape the dark nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My overview was limited to one of these areas – Carnevale, a denied circus where our little characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque and arrow workers (or their corpses, attached or swinging for the sport of their comrades). When we think we were safe, the puppets had sprinted after us until we can team up to drop their wooden heads and crush them. Be noticed by anyone who meant our disappearance, requiring frantic cooperation in the midst of the anxious issues of fairly horrible dead.

It is this tension and the adjustment of the Dour which distinguishes the small nightmares 3 from other cooperative games such as the more excitable and dynamic divided fiction published earlier this year, a flipbook of roller coasters of gaming genres that has made a breathless if not terribly coherent. On the other hand, the section of Little Nightmares 3 that I played took place as a series of dark vignettes which rely on its pleasantly Gothic exhibitions than to work with your friend (or his computer teammate) to progress.

Survive your little nightmares

Although I only had one hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to be iterate rather than innovating far from its predecessors: expect more than the same in new grotesque parameters, just with the addition of welcome of the narrowly designed teamwork. For fans of the series, this is probably a good thing. There is not much else like the little nightmares.

The Carnevale scene that I played opened with red and white red circus tent, which I masked Low (and someone Bandai Namco who kindly played as a combination alone). The brutal factory workers moved away from the factory in search of funfair escape, which became very quickly sinister when we very quickly seen a little attached when others beat them in turn like a piñata. We entered a room to find a worker in connected boxes as a subject of the turn of half a magician … which was not something, because we had to separate the halves to get out of a window. I tried, and I failed, to ignore the viscera that came out of the boxes.

While we hide human -sized enemies, we had to fight wooden puppets. Like the most horrible creations of Geppeto, they set us an ambush in several rooms, which forced me to drop my head with the Low arc and to flee their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush the head with the key to alone.

But most of the rooms aim to solve puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box so that my teammate gets up and pulls a switch or determine how a radio plays in a complex solution. Although these calm moments are a nice break in the combat or tense pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I exceeded a room with a circle of large-scale chairs empty to return a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, motionless but looking at.

And then there are the moments really, really tense. We have moved from carnival to the adjacent candy plant (apparently where all these brutes work) and to the offices where the boss works, to find him sleeping with television in darkness … and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, open a grid, awakening the terrifying spawn that ran after us. After many, a lot of stranded exhausts, my teammate and I discovered that we had to rush for a hiding place after going beyond the grid.

It was perhaps the most frustrating part of the overview when we panicked in search of a solution to our mortal misfortunes (as opposed to the slow and methodical gameplay earlier) – but that is part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mixture. In the end, it was a hard lesson in patience. In the neighboring room, a kitchen, the nightmare baby hit a bowl on the table until the father heads for a corpse (probably his worker) and cuts meat so that his macabre child can eat.

In my short time, Little Nightmares 3 seems to be a cooperative script challenge book for players and their friends (but not couch Buddies, unfortunately – it is online cooperative only) to live. How much he is up to the previous games of the series, especially since the supermassive developer games take more reins from the original games of the creators of the Tarsier franchise, is the assumption of anyone. (The similar spiritual suite of Tarsier to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, arrived in 2026.)

But while the air becomes crisp and Halloween is bearing, it’s the best time of the year for a scary cooperative game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 released on October 10, 2025 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.