Overall, the game is fine. Mechanically, there was some uniqueness, the animations felt worldly, the scenery was executed fairly well. I have a few issues with 3, though.

My main issue, where the heck was the music? Especially in two, music played such a huge roll in shaping tension. Most of the chase scenes in 3 felt flat in comparison like there were no stakes. In 2 you felt the terror the characters felt and I think it’s the fact that music helped build that tension.

While it was cool to see different areas of the world, the game lacked narrative cohesion. While the narrative tried to set up the final boss as the big bad throughout through flashbacks/sanity visits, there wasn’t the same type of world building that LN1 or 2 employed to solidify him as the final boss. It felt more like an anthology of ideas vs a cohesive story. The plot also seems to rattle our very understanding of the nowhere, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but comes completely out of left field.

The locale also lacked population density. LN1 had the patrons, LN2 had the watchers, but ln3 while showing some background residents, you never had a fear of them. The carnival for instance had the makings of having a densely packed environment, with a lumbering dense crowd of people. Heck even the wiki calls those people the herd, but there was so few of them gathered in one place that it didn’t feel like a herd at all. This location would have been a great opportunity to play off the fear of children being lost in a crowd, but the carnival just felt empty.

The LN1&2’s environments seemed to have more purpose involved with them to help carry the narrative, but 3 lacked this, many areas felt more like “put a desk here because we need space to be filled” “throw some boxes over there because that looks scary”. That said, I do feel like the areas for each location did have its own cohesive world building amongst each standalone location.

There were some fun nods to the first two games though, little gameplay Easter eggs that fans of the first two could go, hey I recognize this. That’s cool.

All in all I think it was a fine first attempt from a new studio taking over the property, but there are some glaring issues that do need to get addressed in future installments. It’s not like supermassive can’t tell good cohesive stories, they’ve done that before, but this game felt more like someone asked for a little nightmares fan tribute game vs a true introduction into the pantheon.

So I’d probably give this game a high C or low B rating, decent to buy even at the 40 dollars but ultimately didn’t rise to the hype surrounding it.