Little Nightmares III - The Backstage Review

A trip back into the Carnevale, for better and worse.

You probably remember the Carnevale from Little Nightmares III as one of the better stretches of the base game, so it makes sense that the first piece of story DLC drags you right back into it. Little Nightmares III - The Backstage doesn't try to reinvent what the franchise already built.

Instead, it digs a little deeper into a corner of the Carnevale you only got a glimpse of before, handing you a new playable character and a new way to deal with the monster chasing you. Whether that's enough to justify its own separate release is something you'll have to decide for yourself, but there's no denying it gives you more reasons to care about the world it has set up.

This is where you meet Dime, a new friend who works alongside Low after being split from Alone. No matter whether you play the game with AI or another player, you will be controlling Low and Dime on their quest to rescue Alone from the Puppeteer's grasp. Dime comes with a torch hat strapped to her head, which sounds like a small thing until you realize how much of Little Nightmares III - The Backstage is built around it.

You can flick it on with the press of a button, and it does more than just light up dark corners. You can use it to stun smaller creatures, trigger hidden mechanisms, expose messages scrawled on walls that you'd otherwise miss, and even nudge a few puppets into different poses to solve puzzles. It's a genuinely clever addition, and it doesn't feel bolted on just for the sake of having something new to sell.

Once you've spent enough time tossing cheese at buttons, pulling levers with your partner, and lighting up dark vents, the mechanic starts to feel like it belongs in Little Nightmares III as much as anything from the main campaign.
As far as plot goes, The Little Nightmares III - The Backstage sits somewhere in the Carnevale, closer to the guts of the place where the puppets actually get made.

You spend a good chunk of your time wondering whether those puppets hanging around are just wood and cloth, or whether there's something far worse stitched into them.

The story doesn't spell everything out for you, which is pretty typical of how Little Nightmares III handles its lore, but the implication that some of these figures might have started out as actual children is unsettling enough to sit with you long after you've put the controller down. The main threat through all of this is a towering, unsettling figure often referred to as the Puppeteer, also known elsewhere as the Perfect Lady.

If you've kept up with the official audio fiction series tied to the game, The Sounds of Nightmares, you already have a sense of who she is and why she matters, but even without that context,  Little Nightmares III - The Backstage makes her presence felt the moment she shows up. She moves with this clicking, doll-like gait, and there's something deeply wrong about the way she carries herself that fits right into the unsettling tone Little Nightmares III has always leaned on.

A big part of getting through  Little Nightmares III - The Backstage involves sneaking past her, hiding under furniture, crouching behind crates, and timing your movements around her patrols. You and your partner have to stay low, watch her head turns, and figure out when it's actually safe to move.

There's a sequence where you have to retrieve an item she's picked up, which means waiting for her to settle near her sewing machine before sneaking around her to grab it back, then finding a different path out so you don't run into her on the way. It's tense in the way Little Nightmares III is generally good at being tense, forcing you to read her behavior rather than just memorizing a fixed pattern.

Eventually, things escalate into a proper confrontation.

This is where you have to use your torch hat to stun her and create an opening to escape with Low in tow, which gives Little Nightmares III - The Backstage at least one moment where you're not purely running and hiding, but actively pushing back against her. That pushback mechanic, where you can actually fight back instead of simply evading, is one of the more talked-about additions in this expansion. 

When you flash your torch at her, she visibly reacts, slowing down and seeming disoriented for a few seconds, which buys you and your partner enough time to get away or finish whatever puzzle you're working on. It's framed as a light source overwhelming her, almost like the light is something genuinely harmful to her rather than just a gameplay gimmick.

And it ties into the implication that she has some kind of petrifying ability herself, since there are visitors scattered around who look frozen in place. Smaller threats get caught up in this too. There are these shadowy little creatures, Soul Remains, running around that you deal with the same way, flashing your torch to make them disintegrate before they can swarm you.

There are stretches later on where roughly ten of them come at you from different directions at once, which pushes you to just plant yourself in the middle of the room and keep flashing until the area clears out. It's satisfying in short bursts, though if you're going through Little Nightmares III - The Backstage expecting a ton of variety in how you handle these encounters, you'll notice pretty quickly that it's mostly the same loop repeated: spot the threat, flash it, move on.

These little shadow creatures aren't just filler either.

Since a fair number of people who've gone through Little Nightmares III - The Backstage have pointed out that their appearance here carries some weight on the lore side of things, there's a theory floating around that these shadow kids used to be the bullies you might remember being teased about elsewhere in the series, with portraits scattered through it seemingly backing that idea up. 

Nothing about this is confirmed outright, since Little Nightmares III tends to leave a lot of its backstory open to interpretation, but it's the kind of detail that rewards you for paying attention to your surroundings instead of just rushing through. The puzzle mechanics in Little Nightmares III - The Backstage provide for one of the more noticeable improvements over the original game.

One of the puzzles requires you to pull down hanging lamps in the right order to make the path accessible. Another puzzle requires you to walk on the floor tiles, avoiding the wrong ones, similar to some sort of logic game set right in front of you. These puzzles require you to take your time and think instead of doing something by following obvious clues, and this wasn't always the case in the original game's main storyline.

You will also spend some time throwing cheese at the button located slightly higher than the reach of your arms, since such an action isn't possible for you due to the absence of firearms, which can be used to shoot things from afar. It may take several attempts to learn how to hit the target properly, but it isn't unfair in any way.

Adding to this mix, playing out these puzzles with a companion – be it another player or even the artificial intelligence companion in the game – is another aspect.

Since quite a few of these puzzles actually require both characters to be in a specific place simultaneously, like being on the same lever at the same time or pulling each other up to reach higher places like shelves and cabinets.
Where Little Nightmares III - The Backstage fails compared to the original is, however, its length, as players can manage to experience this expansion in less than an hour to get through the entire thing.

This seems pretty short as something that is not included in the base game but offered as a separate DLC pack. Having in mind that quite a few areas of Little Nightmares III - The Backstage were already seen during the Carnevale chapter in the core game, one can easily say that this DLC was supposed to somehow extend that chapter.

Almost every room you walk through in Little Nightmares III - The Backstage has some kind of purpose, whether that's a puzzle, an encounter with the Puppeteer, or some background detail that adds to the lore, which stands in contrast to parts of the base game where you'd wander through stretches that didn't really ask anything of you.

Therefore, although the game does not feel overstated in any way, there were certainly a lot of people disappointed because of the lack of more opportunities to make use of all the game mechanics implemented. It is possible to see how the game introduces several unique puzzles, but that is all about it before the credits appear on screen.

As far as visuals are concerned, Little Nightmares III - The Backstage does not deviate from the already set visual direction of the base game.

It keeps the same color palette and atmosphere that is already recognizable in the Carnevale part of the game. In case you like how the section looks in the original game, then you will definitely feel at home. On one hand, it keeps the visual identity of Little Nightmares III consistent, and the Carnevale setting still looks genuinely good, full of detail and the kind of unsettling charm the series is known for.

On the other hand, if you were hoping for a brand-new location entirely separate from anything you'd already seen, it doesn't really deliver that, since you're essentially exploring a deeper layer of a place you've already walked through once. In terms of sound effects, Little Nightmares III - The Backstage does not seem to have been trying too much to distinguish itself from the rest of the franchise.

Of course, this is with the exception of certain instances wherein the soundtrack intensifies a little during your encounters with the smaller creatures of shadows, but only enough to create some tension without being too imposing. The clicking sound made by the movements of the Puppeteer is an extension of the theme of her being more of a puppet than a monster.

This gives her a distinctiveness compared to some of the other threats that you had encountered in the past games.
When it comes to new collectibles and perks, Little Nightmares III - The Backstage also offers a few unique achievements related to the particular challenges it offers to players, so there is a way to get even more out of the game for those who strive to complete everything.

None of these features change anything about your experience playing Little Nightmares III - The Backstage, but there is still one more reason why you might want to come back to it.

In conclusion of Little Nightmares III - The Backstage, we can see Dime being taken out of the scene, and seemingly imprisoned in an alternate reality of mirrors while Low and Alone successfully make their way to another place. Such an ending is rather creepy and fits the overall concept of the Little Nightmares franchise quite well by not offering any clear answers for those looking for them. As far as the connection between The Backstage and the main game goes, it remains ambiguous. 

Whether it is a prequel, which fills some holes in the plot of the latter, or a continuation of the same events is not clear enough. Overall, this is an interesting piece of content which reveals how good the franchise's games could be if only its novel gameplay mechanics were given some space to shine, although it seems like this space is a little too small sometimes.

The torch hat system, the constant threat of the Puppeteer catching you off guard, and better-designed puzzles show how much the developers of this series understand what worked in the previous titles and are trying to recreate that magic once again.

On the other hand, the short duration and the use of previously seen Carnevale assets make it impossible not to get the feeling that this could've been implemented in the main game instead of selling this DLC separately. For those who liked Little Nightmares III and want to spend more time with it, this DLC is a good choice, but don't expect any major expansion here, because this is definitely not one.