Originally scheduled for 2024, but pushed back to 2025, you will still have a few peaceful nights before facing the nightmares of Little Nightmares III. A little new feature in the next opus: you will be able to play two against your bad dreams.
Monsters chasing a little girl in a yellow raincoat, deformed cooks blocking her path in an oversized house. A young boy with a paper bag over his head chased by armless mannequins in a hospital. If your nerves got over the first two episodes, you’re ready for Little Nightmares III.
Having come under the umbrella of Embracer Group, the Tarsier studio is no longer at the helm of the Bandai Namco saga, replaced by Supermassive Games (The Dark Picture Anthology, Until Dawn, The Casting of Frank Stone). Specialists in oppressive games who must abandon their appetite for horror to play with our childhood traumas and fears, but who have kept the DNA of a franchise that has already sold more than 12 million copies.
Overcoming Childhood Fears
“Feeling small in a world that is not yours, not being welcome there, while being a spark in a very dark world: that is the DNA of Little Nightmares that we tried to keep,” summarizes to Tech&Co Coralie Feniello, producer of the game expected in 2025 and who had already worked on Little Nightmares II.
Facing your childhood fears is once again the leitmotif of this adventure game that never falls into horror, but just has fun with our stress and anxieties, bringing back our worst nightmares in a rather enjoyable way. At Supermassive, we have therefore written down everyone’s memories of childhood fears, their remains of bad dreams and various traumas. But also the brighter resourcefulness side, the ability to use all the objects around you (umbrella, ball, etc.) to get out of all situations.
The director of the title signed Bandai Namco admits that, to avoid tipping into a horror game, the teams set themselves limits, while “pushing to the maximum” the situations. “I find that it’s always more interesting to have something a little too horror and to try to reduce it to arrive at the right atmosphere, than to do the opposite. It’s always more complicated,” she analyzes.
Once again, the player embodies a young child caught in a dark and nightmarish universe. This year, there are even two heroes, Low and Alone, who will be lost in the Nowhere, filled with disturbing places, traps to foil and strange creatures to avoid. They will have to escape a heavy threat in the heart of The Spiral.
But you won’t play both characters in turn like in the previous episode. This time, you’ll have to choose whether you prefer to be Alone, the little girl with pigtails and her wrench, or Low, a strange boy wearing a raven mask and always equipped with his bow. Small change too: Little Nightmares III is no longer an exclusively single-player game. You play as a pair, either with the help of the AI to embody the second hero or with a friend online in co-op mode (with the upcoming friend pass to invite another player even if they don’t have the game).
Do we play as a pair so as not to be afraid alone? “It’s possible,” smiles Coralie Feniello. “Playing at being afraid is an emotion that is both negative and very positive, a sort of liberation. It’s quite important in everyday life where we are often in a certain monotony. And having this cathartic moment where we want to be afraid, but in a structured way, I find that super enjoyable and super important.”
Of the sweetness and lightness of fear
If the characters’ features are sometimes deliberately exaggerated to be ugly and grotesque, the situations dark with a few streaks of light brought by the two children, the game is never “creepy” for all that. At Bandai, we prefer to talk about “charming horror”. A clever mix of light and poetic fear, but disturbing all the same. And when you take the game in hand, that’s exactly what emerges. An attractive and frightening side, stressful and exciting to see Low and Alone foil the enemy traps, collaborate to avoid falling into a black hole.
The background of the game is also worth a look. There is always something terribly distressing going on in the idea. We think we know what we don’t know. What is happening in this desert and this city of Necropolis that seems abandoned, but also populated by strange beings ready to be merciless with you? This delicate candy factory with its lollipops by the thousands that pile up, what horrors does it really hide behind its production lines?
This is it Little Nightmares IIIa nightmare you fall into like a frightened child, but an adult who delights in it now that he knows that nothing is true: a giant baby running after you, a horrible dimorphic librarian that you must avoid to continue on your way, giant insects ready to impale you. Everything that terrified you and populated your nightmares will inevitably end up around a door or a low wall.
An oppressive and cathartic experience
Playing at being scared is ultimately a kind of cathartic experience that reassures the adult player that we have become. “The childhood memory side puts us in a kind of cocoon. And we are going to break this cocoon with horror,” confides Coralie Feniello. “Monster Baby and its enormous toys, it’s something very uncomfortable. We play with childhood and horror. In the candy factory, we walk around with a lollipop and we have the terrifying supervisor who arrives.”
To look at the world through the eyes of a child, with both gentleness and horror, and to support each other in their adventure to be less afraid. Because the enemy always arrives late in Little Nightmares. First of all, there is a shadow that hovers in the background, which gets closer as the levels progress, noises and silences that create a heavy atmosphere. Music has always been an element that is both melodious and disturbing in the franchise.
An oppressive threat that never warns when it’s going to fall on us. And it works, even better when you’re playing as a pair. We stress together when faced with a situation that we have to manage well so as not to get caught. We jump and laugh about it. Too bad the co-op mode isn’t done locally to experience this hide-and-seek in the dark in a stronger way.
LITTLE NIGHTMARES III – Disponible courant 2025 sur PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch et PC.
