After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.

This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving. 

In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths. 

It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress. 

Surviving your little nightmares

While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.

The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.

While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench. 

But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.

And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate. 

This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.

In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.) 

But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

Now that Apple has debuted the iPhone 17, you may be wondering whether to get that flashy new device or buy last year’s iPhone 16 at a discount. To help with that decision, here’s a breakdown of how the two handsets compare. 

The iPhone 17 starts at $829 (or $799 if you activate with a carrier), the same as the iPhone 16 when it came out — with the caveat that the iPhone 17 starts with a higher 256GB storage option, as opposed to 128GB. 

The iPhone 16 is now available at a $100 discount, though its baseline configuration has 128GB of storage. So, is it worth saving some money, or should you go all out with the latest phone?

Here’s what to know about each phone, from the cameras to the displays to the batteries.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Screen differences

Some of the biggest changes between the iPhone 16 and 17 have to do with the display.

Apple says it shrunk the borders around the screen on the iPhone 17, expanding the display from 6.1 inches on the iPhone 16 to 6.3 inches on the iPhone 17 without expanding its dimensions. The new Ceramic Shield 2 cover on the iPhone 17 offers 3x better scratch resistance, according to the company. 

The baseline iPhone 17 gets a display with a 120Hz refresh rate, as opposed to the 60Hz display on the iPhone 16. That means the iPhone 17 finally supports an always-on display, so you can glance at the time, your notifications and Live Activities without waking the screen.  

The iPhone 17 also gains an anti-reflective coating and a 3,000-nit peak brightness, compared to 2,000 nits on the iPhone 16. That should make it easier to see your phone in bright sunlight.  

Camera differences

Both the iPhone 16 and 17 have a 48-megapixel wide-angle camera. But the iPhone 17 upgrades the ultrawide camera from 12 megapixels on last year’s phone to 48 megapixels. 

The front-facing camera also gets an upgrade, going from 12 megapixels on the iPhone 16 to 18 megapixels on the iPhone 17. There’s a new Center Stage feature for the selfie camera that can automatically adjust from a portrait orientation to landscape to make sure everyone is in the shot. That means you don’t have to manually rotate your phone to its side anymore when there are more people to fit in the frame. 

Both the iPhone 16 and 17 have a Camera Control button on the side to quickly launch the camera, snap some shots and use Apple’s Visual Intelligence tool to learn more about what’s around you.

Processor and RAM

The iPhone 17 packs an A19 chip, an upgrade from the A18 chip in the iPhone 16. One key difference is that the iPhone 17 starts at 256GB, while the iPhone 16 started at 128GB for the same $829 price when it debuted. 

Both phones also support the Apple Intelligence suite of AI capabilities, which includes writing tools, image generators and notification summaries. 

Battery life

Apple doesn’t share specific battery specs, but it does measure longevity via video playback hours. The iPhone 16 supports up to 22 hours of video playback, according to Apple, while the iPhone 17 bumps that up to 30 hours. Stay tuned to CNET’s review of the iPhone 17 to see how that translates in the real world and how the phone holds up to our battery tests.

A new AI-powered Adaptive Power feature arriving with iOS 26 can help conserve the battery by making «small performance adjustments,» like «allowing some activities to take a little longer,» according to Apple. 

The iPhone 17 arrives with the upcoming operating system onboard, but you’ll also be able to download iOS 26 on the iPhone 16, as well as some older iPhones, once it becomes available publicly. That should help to stretch your battery life on either device.

Color options and design

What’s on the inside may be most important, but people also care what their phone looks like. Like the iPhone 16, the iPhone 17 comes in a range of fun colors: black, white, mist blue, sage (a light green) and lavender.

For comparison, the iPhone 16 is available in black, white, pink, teal and ultramarine.

Both phones have an aluminum frame.

If you’re leaning toward the iPhone 17, preorders start Friday, and the phone hits store shelves on Friday, Sept. 19.   

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Wordle puzzle was an easy one for me, for a change! If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.

Today’s Wordle hints

Before we show you today’s Wordle answer, we’ll give you some hints. If you don’t want a spoiler, look away now.

Wordle hint No. 1: Repeats

Today’s Wordle answer has no repeated letters.

Wordle hint No. 2: Vowels

Today’s Wordle answer has two vowels.

Wordle hint No. 3: First letter

Today’s Wordle answer begins with C.

Wordle hint No. 4: For your house

Today’s Wordle answer refers to a piece of furniture.

Wordle hint No. 5: Meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can refer to where you might sit at your kitchen table.

TODAY’S WORDLE ANSWER

Today’s Wordle answer is CHAIR.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer

Yesterday’s Wordle answer, Sept. 10, No. 1544 was POUTY.

Recent Wordle answers

Sept. 6, No. 1540: BULGE

Sept. 7, No. 1541: TENOR

Sept. 8, No. 1542: CHIRP

Sept. 9, No. 1543: TRICK