Tarsier returns to horror with a rich, meaningful evolution of its familiar Little Nightmares formula. And while it could benefit from being a little more radical, it remains utterly compelling; bleak, nasty, and full of menace.
It’s impossible to talk about Reanimal without talking about Little Nightmares. Developer Tarsier’s first game since departing the series that put it on the map (part three was handled elsewhere with middling results) is so Little Nightmares coded it’s difficult to ignore. This is a game of two spindly limbed moppets, Boy and Girl, lost in a hellish, hostile world. Play is structured around recurring boss characters and inevitable crescendo pursuits. And Reanimal even shares many of its predecessor’s affectations, from the enigmatic opening tease – here the mouldering mouth of a well opening onto a threatening sky – to the way our precocious protagonists return from death huddled together, as if woken from a premonitory dream.
Reanimal review
But for all its inarguable similarities, Reanimal also feels like a very different mood. For one, the horrors our burgeoning band of children face are no longer filtered through the softening lens of Burton-esque whimsy. This is a bleak, vicious, violent world, and often genuinely disturbing. And beyond its grimier, nastier tone, it’s wildly more ambitious, more experimental too. The first big surprise is the voices – an addition that could have easily undermined its sense of haunted isolation. But from the very first line of dialogue – a meek, accusatory, “I thought you were dead”, Tarsier nails the delivery. There are maybe a dozen more lines to come, each more chilling in its strange ambiguity, especially when delivered by – I think? – real children. And then there’s the camera; a restless, shifting thing that sees Tarsier breaking away from the constraints of its beloved side-on perspective to frame its cinematic third-person action – its fog-smothered oceans, its flooded streets, its burnt out forests, and forgotten industry – for maximum impact.
Reanimal trailer.Watch on YouTube
We begin, though, on eerie-calm waters, Boy and Girl’s early rowboat journey guided through the black of night by screaming gulls and the faint red lights of distant buoys. For a while, it seems Tarsier might have completely broken free of structural tradition, as we drift freely into the unknown; through crumbling abyssal caverns and along winding, mine-littered inlets. But soon enough, as the boat runs aground in the shadow of something like a vast concrete fortress, Reanimal falls into a more familiar rhythm.
Just like Little Nightmares, Reanimal builds its progress around a series of essentially episodic creature encounters, following a predictable formula of introduction, escalation, and then final confrontation before moving onto the next. And Tarsier has imagined genuinely unsettling horrors here – wretched, tortured creatures warped into ungodly fusions of other more terrible things – that further accentuates its bleaker, meaner, more hopeless tone.
Reanimal’s world, too, is a fascinating one. This shattered island, ripped asunder by the ocean, is an unexpectedly contemporary dystopia. Early on, our young siblings find themselves lost amid abandoned industry; desolate rail yards making way for crumbling urban squalor, then forgotten farmland, weather-battered coastlines, and so on. It’s a world of carparks and supermarkets, of taxi cabs and school buses, that’s at once immediately familiar and entirely alien. And while there’s the faintest wisp of a narrative – of humanity and nature locked in a doomed cycle of corruption, perhaps – it’s more of a mood piece told through the subtle suggestion of its environmental design than a coherent story.
As to how Reanimal plays, Tarsier largely prioritises forward momentum here, introducing only the gentlest friction. There are simple puzzles – most often wanting you to find this thing, use it here – as well as basic one-button combat, used sparingly to inject a sudden shock of tension. There’s a bit of light platforming, even a bit of driving, but the focus is very much on maintaining pace rather than mechanical escalation. Notably, though, progress isn’t entirely linear, and the world provides some space to breathe. Occasionally you’ll reach an impasse and must explore further afield to find a solution. And each new area is filled with little secrets – half-hidden passageways, mysterious alcoves – for those eager to collect masks, concept art, and other more esoteric things. But Tarsier keeps the reins tight enough that its claustrophobic mood is never allowed to dissipate – even during the handful of more open-ended sailing segments, which mostly serve as a palette cleanser between major areas.
All in all, it makes for a perfectly solid, if perhaps unremarkable mechanical foundation. Which might be more concerning if it wasn’t for Reanimal’s relentless pacing. Tarsier’s set-piece work, its meticulous choreography, is often properly astonishing – the studio knowing exactly when to switch from foreboding silence to all-out action. I really don’t want to spoil too much, but there are some stellar moments here – from a collapsing train-top chase to a precarious cliffside escape blighted by amassing birds. And notably, the combination of tighter controls, sensible checkpointing, and more forgiving failstates means it neatly sidesteps the frequent trial-and-error frustrations of Little Nightmares. And the spectacle of it all, the pure cinema of that shifting camera, ensures it retains a convincing sense of peril even without more frequent game overs.
A note on co-op
As a purely solo experience, Reanimal works great, your AI-controlled companion picking up the slack when necessary. But, while I’ve not had chance to try it yet, it’s clear Tarsier has thought carefully about Reanimal’s two-player mode – and I suspect it adds an interesting layer of friction.
Reanimal is full of moments built around asynchronous and synchronous actions: you’ll spin valves with your partner, hoist each other onto platforms, rescue each other during combat, and perform more elaborate tasks too. Playing solo, all this is flattened down into something more simplistic, and I’m fascinated to see how co-op changes things. I’ll be reporting back elsewhere.
In fact, given how much it contributes to the experience, Tarsier’s camera is worth dwelling on for a little longer. There are moments when you’re lost at sea, only for it to pull back for a spectacular reveal as vast shapes emerge through the fog. There’s a dizzyingly vertiginous staircase pursuit that, viewed from above, is pure panic as grasping limbs burst up from rising shadows. Sometimes too, Tarsier deploys subtle transitional tricks to throw doubt on Reanimal’s spatial cohesion, further unmooring its sense of reality – there’s a neat bit involving a bus stop where, simply by tightening the frame, Tarsier shifts the mood entirely. Admittedly, form occasionally exceeds function, leading to moments of frustration – a few times I felt completely lost amid a sweeping vista – but it feels like a small price to pay given how integral Reanimal’s roving eye is in building its atmosphere and tension. And if atmosphere is what makes good horror, then Reanimal – with its grim world built from stark shadowplay and searing stabs of red, its grotesque animation work, and its relentlessly oppressive sound design – is killer. This might not be a scary game, but it’s full of genuine menace.
All of which has left me wondering why I’m not quite so enamoured with Reanimal as I feel I should be, why by the time it reached its conclusion eight-or-so-hours later, I was left feeling just a little bit unfulfilled. Partly, I think it’s down to its wilfully elusive story, whose enigmatic, intentionally anticlimactic ending feels like it’s been designed as much for Reddit theorycrafting as it does to provide satisfying narrative resolution (and who knows where the upcoming story DLC will take things). Partly too, I think it’s down to Reanimal’s episodic framework; the predictable ebb and flow of events it’s borrowed straight from Little Nightmares. Familiarity is, perhaps, the enemy of horror, and – for all Tarsier’s elaborate choreography – Reanimal’s inarguable thrills feel a little undermined by its adherence to routine.
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But those are minor concerns in the greater scheme, and there’s so much here I adore. Reanimal is a game of phenomenal mood and artistry, and it builds on a familiar formula in a way that feels like genuinely meaningful evolution, even if it might ultimately have benefitted from being more radical. And while I won’t pretend to fully understand the depth of its enigma, Tarsier’s latest is a dark, violent, and grimly compelling journey through a remarkable vision of something like hell.
