The Little Nightmares III Demo Runs Like a Dream on Steam Deck

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Little Nightmares III is just a few short weeks away from its launch on October 9th, and there's a demo available on Steam. We thought we'd check it out and see how the game performs on the Steam Deck and if this is one we'll be able to enjoy on the go, or sat under a blanket on our sofa, as the case may be.

The demo is a pretty short one, easily completable in under 30 minutes, but it does give us a glimpse of the game's style as well as how performance might be on the Steam Deck.

Little Nightmares III (Demo) - Gameplay Impressions

Little Nightmares III looks to capture a similar atmosphere to its predecessors, with dark, moody environments, which look great on a Steam Deck OLED, plenty of unnerving ambient sounds, and the classic giant monsters who threaten to do unspeakable things to your tiny people.

I did struggle with a couple of things in the demo, namely depth perception during some of the movement, but this is something I always struggle with in 2.5D games. In terms of the actual presentation, puzzles, and feel of the game, it seems like Little Nightmares III is keeping the same high quality as its predecessors, despite changing hands of developers.

The AI partner could have handled one of the puzzles better, one that required both players to jump at the same time. Seeing as an AI would know exactly when a player jumps, it should just copy the player's movement, rather than have the player try to copy the AI's movement.

The game also seems to be very generous with its checkpoints; seemingly every encounter or puzzle has an autosave before it, so if you do fail at it, you can try again right away.

Little Nightmares III (Demo) - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Little Nightmares III does have a 1280x800 resolution as an option, but the game still displays in 16:9, sadly, giving us black borders on the top and bottom. On the plus side, the game recommends you use a controller to play, and the controls work great on the Steam Deck.

The demo defaults to the lowest settings, although with 100% resolution scaling, and caps the game to 30 FPS. I raised that cap to 60 FPS and was pleasantly surprised to see the Steam Deck manage to hold it throughout most of the demo. There were only a couple of occasions when the giant used their light where the FPS dropped into the 50s, but it's possible we could be playing Little Nightmares III at 60 FPS with some gentle upscaling.

Despite the game being on "low" settings, it still looked great, and doesn't compromise the atmosphere of the game, with lighting, shadows, and some post-processing effects still in use.

Power draw was pretty high during the demo, mostly being around 16-21W, so don't expect any more battery life than 2.5 hours from a Steam Deck OLED, and around 1.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD.

Final Thoughts

The Little Nightmares III demo gives me a lot of hope that we could be playing the full release at 60 FPS with some upscaling, or at least 40 FPS without upscaling when it launches later in October. Either way, this one should easily be playable on the Steam Deck.

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