Producer Coralie Feniello spills some extra beans on the cute horror sequel
I saw a little hands off demo, and spoke to producer Coralie Feniello, who told me that co-op was the most demanded feature from their community of players (though you can also play Little Nightmares 3 in single player, with an AI). “We already asked ourselves the question forLittle Nightmares II, but it wasn’t the right time for it,” she said. “And now, working with Supermassive Games who had an extended knowledge of multiplayer, it really was the right moment to do it.”
The characters you play as, Low and Alone, are once again a couple of little children, and the co-opery comes from Low having a bow and Alone carrying a wrench. Puzzles will require them to use their different tools - Alone might have to smash a wall, for example - as well as operating levers or giving each other a leg up. Feniello says balancing this required a lot of iteration, testing whether you should be able to run if Low has the bow readied, and that kind of thing. The footage shared showed a mixture of using these new items, but also some puzzles fans will recognise, like sneaking past a giant eye looking for you by hiding in shadows, or synchronised jumping on a stuck trap door to get through it.
It also just kinda looks like Little Nightmares, right? Which is a good thing. I don’t think Supermassive are trying to reinvent the wheel here, and Feniello said that Supermassive are “checking each detail from the previous ones to make sure that we have the same kind of vibe.” It does look, like most sequels, a bit expanded. Little Nightmares 3 is set in a place called The Spiral, a “cluster of dystopian lands built upon disturbed delusions”. The segment of gameplay shown took place in theNecropolis, a dusty stone ruin stalked by a giant infant called Monster Baby. “For us, the important thing is to find what are people’s internal childhood fears,” said Feniello, and explained that because everyone, even on the team, has their own fears, there’s still things left to explore.
The playtime is not, Feniello told me, actually fixed right now, but she said that she feels this time they’re pushing more into showing exteriors and wider locations. “Each place is very different in the game. We have several locations which have several enemies, several stories, several secrets,” she said.
Little Nightmares' podcast, The Sounds Of Nightmares, is a six parter fictional series telling the story of a girl named Noone, living in a psychiatric unit in the real world of Little Nightmares (the games take place in the nightmarish Nowhere). Each episode will feature a discussion of a childhood fear framed as a session with a counsellor, written by a different writer. One idea was even contributed by a member of the community.
