2 hours ago
3
“I thought you were dead,” are the first words you’ll hear from the child protagonists of this horror puzzle-platformer. It’s your first sign that things were going badly long before you got here. Exploring dark waves and desolated urban environments in a rowboat, they’re on a search for their lost friends across a world of rabid, malformed entities. As the children struggle with their outsize fears, so will you, but you’ve at least got the option to play co-op if you want someone on the couch to brave the horrors with.
In the early 2000s, irreverent gaming blog Old Man Murray pioneered the “crate review system”. The rubric was simple: the sooner the player encountered their first wooden cube of heinous mediocrity, the more uninspired the game. Updating this method for 2026, we’ve got a few new contenders: how soon before you shimmy slowly through a gap, boost a companion over a high ledge so they can pull you up or tediously rotate some mechanism with the analogue stick? Reanimal pulls out all these hits within the first 20 minutes and, by the time the credits roll, six hours in, it feels as if developer Tarsier has wrung the final drops of interactive novelty from its formula of light exploration puzzles, tense but simple stealth and ghastly chases. And yet this grim fairytale is still difficult to put down.
Tarsier’s Little Nightmares games were rightly praised for how their imposing and exaggerated worlds hold up a creepy funhouse mirror to a child’s thoughts and fears. Adults are gangly and terrifying; work is bizarre; bureaucracy is uncanny. Reanimal draws from that same well of fear, but with occasional riffs that feel at odds with childhood disempowerment, such as moments where the kids pilot a tank, or find a big honking bazooka.
The world’s worn and weary architecture feels fascinatingly wretched, with assured cinematography and arresting scale. Concrete and steel creak out sorrowful stories of decay and disaster. The starring pair make their way through crumbling bulkheads, a rotting orphanage and a forest so dark and dense that sunrise as a concept feels like a fanciful myth. Obscured crawlspaces hide away moments of reprieve in the form of silly, sad little secrets, proving that even your worst nightmare is more bearable with a traffic cone on your head.
Observing their confidence and resourcefulness, you get the sense these kids have been dealing with hell for a long time. But they’re still kids. You’ll clumsily swing a crowbar at giant seagulls, or take a break to use a rusted slide. You’ll play grandmother’s footsteps through a flooded basement, sneaking in time with clattering washing machines to hide the sound of your movement from the awful, lanky presence just a few feet away. Lovingly animated detail brightens up the murkiness; the kids will help each other up and dust themselves off after falls, and beds quiver when you jump on them. A lighter and lamp to banish the gloom provide small comforts, but comforts all the same.
And, yes, the handful of marquee moments spent running from or tussling with gargantuan creatures are spectacular. I will never turn my back on a pelican again as long as I live. Throughout, Reanimal drip-feeds clues to compelling mysteries surrounding the nature of its world and the children’s place within it. A shame, then, that it whiffs its apparent swing at recapturing the gut-punch of Little Nightmares II’s ending.
One early sequence sees you creep through a dilapidated theatre while a projector flickers between macabre images. Reanimal, too, relies on a celluloid reel of darkly beautiful scenes: they’re undeniably memorable in isolation, they just don’t form an especially cogent whole.
