Reanimal Review

After a series of bureaucratic complications, Tarsier Studios lost its main IP — Little Nightmares. The developers stated that they wanted to move forward and create something different, unrelated to the well-known series. Meanwhile, the little nightmares continued to live on in the hands of Supermassive Games. The new project from Tarsier Studios received the promising title Reanimal, which can very loosely be deciphered as "rebirth into a beast". Before release, many journalists predicted that Reanimal would become a hit and bring back "those very little nightmares", since Little Nightmares 3 failed to gain recognition. In this review, I will try to analyze whether the developers truly fulfilled their promise to create something different, and also reflect on whether metaphor is really as good as a coherent story.

The Little Nightmares series has always rested on three main pillars: simple gameplay built around solving spatial puzzles, a surreal narrative, and a dense atmosphere of anxiety. When I first launched Reanimal, I already knew what to expect. Although I didn’t get to play the demo, I was familiar with the trailers, as well as numerous comments claiming that Little Nightmares 3 turned out to be a dull mediocrity with only one advantage — co-op — so we should wait for a real hit from those who "know their stuff".

However, I couldn’t shake the thought that the developers had promised not to rest on their laurels and to deliver a new experience. It’s important to note here that Reanimal is a very short game. You can finish it in about 5–6 hours on average, so there’s not much time to build momentum. Everything unusual and interesting should be shown as quickly and as extensively as possible so the player has time to explore and enjoy it. And as it turns out, there are exactly two things that are truly "different" in the project — a darker atmosphere and, essentially, vehicles.

If the first point is self-explanatory, the second requires clarification. By vehicles, I mean segments where you control a boat or some other form of transport. These segments now make up a significant portion of the game. In every other respect, I was genuinely surprised at how afraid Tarsier Studios actually is to move away from the familiar working formulas it created itself.

Let’s start counting: children as the main characters with different bags, masks, buckets on their heads — check; hyperbolically oversized environments to amplify the feeling of helplessness and "smallness" in a hostile world — present; bosses whom we first see in fragments or from afar, and then either run from for a long time or defeat in some clever way — of course; a completely incoherent plot that leans more on form than substance — naturally; spatial puzzles solved in five seconds with a single button — plenty.

It creates an interesting situation where the studio lost its main IP, grandly promised not to rest on its achievements and to create something entirely different, but ultimately failed to deliver anything beyond what it had already done twice before. I read many glowing reviews, but if you summarize them all, the game has exactly two strengths: a thick, dark atmosphere that complements a dramatic story which, admittedly, no one actually understood, and co-op. Funny, isn’t it? Something very similar was said about Little Nightmares 3.

Still, there are changes. In previous games, characters almost always moved from left to right. Now we have 3D, so the heroes are freer, and the camera angles are more interesting. However, this has created one of the game’s main problems. You might be surprised, but in Reanimal it’s very difficult to see anything clearly. The overall palette has become darker and almost never strays beyond gray-black-brown tones. The characters are designed in the same shades and simply blend into the environment. Even on a large, high-quality TV, I repeatedly encountered the same issue: directions are not readable at all.

It gets worse when enemies appear. As tradition dictates, the new game is full of segments where characters must run from opponents. Quickly orienting yourself in this dark mess is often impossible, so most reloads happen not because of overall difficulty, but because you failed to notice a ledge or ran into grass and lost sight of the character model.

The developers also, for some reason, decided it would be a good idea to implement an "invisible trajectory of victory". To better explain what I mean, think about how monster chases work in standard 2D: you have a path from left to right, and that’s the only path available, so the entire challenge lies in quickly and precisely pressing jump or other buttons to overcome obstacles without stumbling. This approach feels like logical difficulty scaling, because otherwise there would be no point in a chase — you can’t deviate from the path in 2D anyway.

With the introduction of depth, however, Tarsier Studios’ approach to chases hasn’t changed at all. There are specific obstacles that must be passed in a strictly defined way. If you deviate even slightly or stumble, the enemy instantly catches up and kills you with a single hit, even when it’s clear that there is room to maneuver. Essentially, there is only one correct route, as if we were still in a 2D perspective, and it must be followed along a pre-designed trajectory at a constant speed. Any deviation from the intended design means death.

The issue is especially noticeable in the final segments, when the children seize a tank. The vehicle moves at one constant speed, with a monster chasing it. The only way to slow the monster down is to shoot it with the cannon. However, if you accidentally choose a route not intended by the developers and go through a small obstacle, you’ll see the following: the tank breaks the obstacle and seems to pass through without issues, the monster continues to take shells to the face and should be significantly slowed, yet somehow it suddenly reaches the characters and crushes them flat. The same thing happens in absolutely every chase segment. And that’s not even mentioning that most of them are made in the best traditions of early 2000s console games, where the perspective shifts from behind the characters to facing them, forcing you to run blindly while seeing a giant chupacabra behind you. This kind of gameplay solution has been considered outdated for about 15 years, so developers tend to avoid it or use it very cautiously. But Tarsier Studios wouldn’t know that, since in 2D this problem didn’t exist.

As a result, all chase scenes turned out, frankly, to be an acquired taste. The game doesn’t present a challenge where you clearly feel that each failure is your own mistake or inattention. Instead, irritation builds up, because Reanimal repeatedly breaks its own rules in an attempt to punish you for not understanding the developers’ vision.

Still, it must be noted that sometimes 3D allows for incredibly beautiful shots. Yes, they’re still poorly readable from a gameplay perspective, but highly atmospheric. I especially liked the moments when the camera first pulls away from the heroes and then zooms in on the children sneaking into a house, for example through a window. Such scenes work excellently for immersion and create a feeling of confinement, restriction, and oppressive space. The rare moments when the children step into open areas are perceived almost like a breath of fresh air. Very subtle direction and staging.

And yes, the string of enclosed corridors is now diluted with vast open spaces without walls. The world is still empty and offers nothing to do, but emotionally it works beautifully. Several times, the player is shown gigantic cliffs, houses, or other structures that once again emphasize the weakness of the main characters.

Speaking of them. As I learned from official information about the game, we take on the roles of a brother and sister. At the same time, Reanimal itself doesn’t even hint at this. The boy and the girl are distinguished by characteristic "masks" that hide their faces. The former wears a sack with a hanged man’s rope, and the latter has rabbit ears and a muzzle. We’ll return to the story later, but the main task is to search for friends stuck in various corners of this strange island or perhaps city. An interesting detail is that now the heroes speak. Though five lines throughout the entire game can hardly be called meaningful communication. I sincerely tried to reflect on every line thrown out there, but I still couldn’t find anything that even remotely explained what was happening.

Reanimal can be played solo or in co-op, including local co-op. There is no split screen: the game won’t allow you to stray far from your companion, which is actually a good thing. If you’re sitting together in front of one screen, you always see the full picture without irritating lines or similar nonsense. I completed the game this way, getting the maximum impression from the interaction, so I want to dwell on this separately.

Earlier I mentioned that gameplay in Tarsier Studios’ projects has never been particularly deep, but this time it seems to have been simplified to the extreme. Absolutely everything is done with a single button, and many physics-based animations, such as pulling your companion toward you, happen automatically. In rare cases, you’ll need to turn levers or crouch behind cover. And that’s literally it. When there are co-op examples like Split Fiction or It Takes Two, the developers of Reanimal failed to invent a single new interesting interaction beyond a minecart that accelerates through joint effort and one single plank that will fall if no one stands on the opposite end. In my subjective opinion, there are even fewer environmental interactions than in the first Little Nightmares, and the shared experience stands out most during transitions through numerous doors: one hero cannot enter until they call the other. On the bright side, if your friend or significant other rarely plays games, they’ll be absolutely delighted. Even someone far removed from computer entertainment can master the local controls.

As the story progresses, a semblance of a combat system appears. Each character wields their own weapon, though they aren’t permanently tied to them. In general, you’ll either fight with a crowbar, which requires a very slow wind-up, or a knife, whose strikes are significantly faster and more effective. Some vehicles also come equipped with weapons. For example, the boat has harpoons.

All of this sounds fairly engaging, but in reality it’s implemented at a very rudimentary level. There’s nothing particularly interesting about action scenes where you’re supposed to strike enemies. At best, it’s button-mashing a handful of opponents without any strategy and with rather clumsy animations. Moreover, the developers make a classic mistake of anyone who inserts combat but doesn’t quite know how to handle it: once your character begins a swing, the animation cannot be canceled. Meanwhile, enemies, naturally, do not wait and attack from all sides. The result is predictable: while you’re fighting one, you’re killed from behind. And yes, a single hit is enough to send the boy or his sister to a reload screen, whereas enemies typically require four solid strikes. Particularly irritating is the inability to revive your companion if your own character is still standing. No matter how well you play, if one dies, both restart.

Projectiles on vehicles present the same questionable situation. The harpoons slightly break up the tedious sailing, which takes up about a third of the total runtime, but don’t expect anything special or complex. In other cases, projectiles are only needed in boss fights and nothing more.

In the end, after analyzing the gameplay, I cannot call Reanimal an engaging game. The playthrough leaves a persistent feeling that Tarsier Studios is stuck in self-repetition and simply unwilling to develop the concept it once created, even though there is room to grow. You don’t have to dig deep. It would have been enough to add more interesting spatial puzzles where co-op truly played an important role. Yes, that would have hurt the solo experience, but the developers themselves constantly hinted that the game reveals itself best in co-op, so they should have committed to that direction fully.

So what about the story and atmosphere? After all, these are also fundamental pillars of Tarsier Studios’ projects. Let’s start with the obvious: there is no real plot in the game. For fans, this won’t come as a shock. Both Little Nightmares titles were one giant metaphor and a goldmine for YouTube video creators who immediately churned out dozens of breakdowns after release. However, the overall metaphorical nature did not prevent an adult from forming their own interpretation of events, adding two and two together, and roughly understanding what the authors were trying to say.

In Reanimal, the writers have retreated into a depth understandable only to themselves, piling on so many themes that they simply do not align with one another. Just when it seems you’ve grasped most of the allusions, something happens that completely breaks the concept. Moreover, the telling title pushes your thoughts in a particular direction. Everything is evaluated through the lens of that very "return to the animalistic origin", yet even here the story doesn’t function properly. I will outline the premise to avoid accidentally revealing something important.

A boy in a sack with a noose around his neck sails in a boat. This is either unreality or a heavily distorted perception of a child. His attention is drawn to the cries of seagulls. Approaching closer, the boy pulls a girl out of the water, who immediately attacks him. Why? Unclear. The boy is surprised and says he thought she was dead. So they already know each other. Then the girl asks where the others are. The boy doesn’t know. That’s where the adventure begins.

It quickly becomes clear that the area is ravaged by war. It is in full swing: traces of destruction are everywhere, along with numerous underwater mines. There is also a frightening man who dries the skin of water-swollen corpses and then wears it, a mutated bird, an incomprehensible hairy spider, a ram-monster, sea creatures, and numerous bipedal sheep and bloated pigs. None of it is random, everything has meaning and a double bottom. Especially since the children are clearly visiting familiar places they have been to before. But then comes the ending…

Up until the last third, the overall picture forms with difficulty but still holds together. The finale, however, shatters the entire perception of a deconstruction of the simple idea about children during wartime. Suddenly mysticism appears and an explicit revenge for a terrible evil committed with good intentions. Why? For what? All of this remains unanswered. Even the extended ending, which you can unlock by finding coffins with the souls of all the children, does not make the outcome clearer. Almost every interpretation has arguments both for and against it. But in the end, no cohesive understanding emerges.

Some will say this is intelligent art that requires contemplation. I would say it is a collection of scenes where showing an impressive form and atmosphere mattered more than telling gamers a story. What value does an idea or message have if no one can understand it? I would very much like to hear the canonical interpretation of events from the developers themselves, but that is unlikely to ever happen.

At the same time, that very form turned out to be beyond praise. The atmosphere of Reanimal is indeed much darker and denser than in both Little Nightmares titles. The overall oppressive helplessness and devastation are conveyed with surprising precision. Every room and scene displays the horrors of war and the consequences of clashes: deserted streets, ruined apartments, abandoned farms. In the world of Reanimal there are three types of living beings besides the children themselves: monsters, animals, and, strangely enough, humans. The latter are represented exclusively by soldiers, but they are quite real. Some drive vehicles, others fight in trenches or commit suicide when they see no way out. In all of this, the children feel like silent observers of what is happening, like spirits, though they are certainly not ghosts.

It’s important to note that Tarsier Studios are unquestionably masters of horror. They frighten in a refined way, building tension on every level of perception without crossing the line into cheap jump scares. In Reanimal, no one jumps out from around a corner, but being in this world is physically uncomfortable for all five hours. Even relatively calm scenes provoke anxiety, and the monsters are properly repulsive, but only to the degree that you don’t want to turn away from the screen. I would even say that this is the studio’s best horror work. It truly represents the peak of their craftsmanship. A pity that it is only in form, not in substance.

The graphics also deserve separate mention. Despite the bleak color palette and visual design, Unreal Engine 5 once again demonstrates its strengths. I played on PS5 and did not encounter any significant bugs. At the same time, lighting and shadows make each frame and scene distinctive, adding texture and depth.

At one time, Tarsier Studios effectively created a new subgenre — stylish surreal horror about children. Nine years after the release of the first Little Nightmares, the studio still has no obvious competitors, yet no tangible progress is visible either. Reanimal is undoubtedly a high-quality but very cautious repetition of past achievements, where they tried to further polish what already worked well, while overlooking elements that truly needed refinement. I am convinced that if the developers had dared to complicate the gameplay and add a proper story, where metaphors do not require hours of internet analysis, we would have received a new masterpiece. Unfortunately, Reanimal is just as far from that title as Little Nightmares 3. A decent attempt and clearly not a failure, but not the revelation many were hoping for either. It is also a solid co-op experience that ends precisely when it risks becoming tedious, but I would be lying if I said the game has no problems.