Little Nightmares 3 evokes all the dreams of being a child again – Preview

Little Nightmares 3 plays how a Cormac McCarthy novel reads. The levels move inch by inch, each little scene bottling up a visceral moment of time; painstakingly aiming an arrow at a hanging crate, scraping a chest across concrete floor, pushing a brick through a wall to reveal another dingy, decrepit crawlspace. Each vignette captures the essence of a world abandoned, now overrun by violence and mortality.

My first experience playing a Little Nightmares game was devastating. It was at Gamescom this year, sandwiched between interviews and slanging matches with cosplayers in the Koelnmesse, and I didn’t have long. I had the choice between being Low or Alone, my typical Friday night, and I picked the former, a boy wearing a raven’s giant skull. The game’s dual protagonists are starved and skinny with rags barely clinging to their bodies. They creep forward through the world perhaps the same as we did as children, cautiously but curious.

It makes you feel small. You will need the strength of both Low and Alone to pull a lever down, and only in the long distance will you hear a door opening. On your way there, you will pass the monolithic husks of dead giants; the abrasive environment has sculpted itself around these stone corpses. Each frame of this game looks like it was ripped straight out of Zdzisław Beksiński’s most insidious dreams. You can’t help but climb onto a giant arm poking out of the dust, leap off, and do it again. There’s a surreal sense of morbid curiosity as you plod through the decaying world, impressively overwhelming in scale. 

For reference, Zdzisław Beksiński was a Polish painter whose work was concerned with “photographing dreams.” His landscapes often featured malnourished, necrotic corpses simply existing in environments that echoed a ravaged 20th century Eastern Europe. It’s hard for me to believe that Little Nightmares wasn’t directly inspired by this.

The series is no doubt framed by nightmares and dreams. It’s hard to describe that specific ‘dream’ feeling. Walking is weird, you feel weightless and out of control, the world is familiar but wrought with something simply wrong. In some ways, though, it’s empowering to feel like this. But being little in this world doesn’t always feel like a disadvantage, especially when you’re not alone.

This is the first Little Nightmares with a true two-player experience, although in the preview my other half was just AI. I could direct it with sharp whistles and by placing myself where I wanted. It made figuring out one of the puzzles like cogs on a gear slotting into place and then watching an entire mechanism turn. If things click this well with an AI, I can only imagine it gets better with two people of the flesh playing.

I didn’t play Little Nightmares 3 for that long – only 20 or 30 minutes. It didn’t take long for the charming yet uncanny existence of Low and Alone to leave an impact on me, or for the overgrown Necropolis to tug on my curiosity. Playing the franchise for the first time, I was immediately reminded of Little Big Planet, the film 9 (2009), Coraline and making toys out of chicken bones when I was young – it made me feel like a child again. I’m looking forward to seeing how Little Nightmares 3 develops from here on out.