Reanimal
Verdict
Reanimal is four hours of the most surreal monsters and beautiful horror art direction I've seen, best played blind and together. The story is too thin and crashes hurt the atmosphere, but nothing else looks or feels like this.
Who's it for?Anyone into surreal horror art and creature design, and above all two friends looking for a coop horror game they can actually finish together.
Who should skip it?Anyone who needs a gripping story, or who measures a game by hours per euro.
What do you miss if you skip it?It's a standalone game, so you don't need to have played any other game first, not even Little Nightmares.
Pros
- creative monsters you wont find anywhere else
- an art direction and atmosphere that may justify the expensive price per hour
- coop as the best way to experience
- individually designed places and memorable locations
- the end credits song
Cons
- crashes and bugs break the atmosphere
- the story is too thin and the ending too abrupt
- not a lot of variety in puzzles and gameplay mechanics
- missed potential for coop-specific mechanics
going in blind.
I never played the Little Nightmares games, but from the art style, atmosphere and unusual horror elements alone I knew Reanimal would be a special game for me. For the most part it fulfilled that role, just maybe not to the heights I hoped it would reach.
behind the scenes: a successor without the name.
Tarsier made the first two Little Nightmares games, but the licence stayed with Bandai Namco when they left. Reanimal is what they made next under their own name. Fans of both series call it “the real Little Nightmares 3”.
Its other stated inspirations are It Takes Two, The Wind Waker and Silent Hill 2.
the creatures.
What makes the creatures in Reanimal special is that they are animals that look like they crawled back out of their own graves, stretched and decaying in ways that are as disgusting as they are beautiful to look at. I think they are definitely the main reason to play this game. You dont get such surreal, terrifying yet artistically interesting monsters anywhere else, let alone in such a beautiful art style. When I think back on the game, they are the first thing that comes to mind.
the places.
Just as memorable as the monsters are some of the places Reanimal lets you explore. A handful of them are the most individually designed environments in the game, unique not only for a game in general but within the world of Reanimal itself. You open a door and immediately know where you are, without anyone telling you. Others build their character more subtly, stretched out over a whole chapter rather than one particular room or place. Although the visual storytelling leaves something to be desired, this gives so many locations their own vibe that they stay in your mind long after you finish the game.
trivia: the island out of time.
Reanimal mixes eras on purpose: a 1940s to 60s look, 1980s cars, 1990s computers and WWI trenches next to WWII vehicles. That mix is a big part of why every place feels like its own little world, and why the island never settles into one real time or place.
the sound.
Most of the runtime the music is subtle and ambient. This is a good decision because it doesnt pull attention away from the visuals, which are undoubtedly one of the best aspects of the game for me. The monster sounds are convincing and high quality, but what really makes the sound for me is the end credits song “All is Well”, such an atmospheric, calm yet eerie melody that lets you sit with your thoughts after an ending you cant wrap your head around quite yet.
scared together.
I played it with a friend who was down to play through it with me, and we will play the DLC together too. Coop means being scared together, which is always more fun and laid back than being scared alone. I love that Reanimal has this integral coop mode inspired by It Takes Two, and I want more games in more genres to adopt it, just like Reanimal did for horror. One of my favourite things is playing games with a clear ending and an intended runtime. Going through that first clear together is just such a rewarding experience.
the gameplay.
It Takes Two being an inspiration alongside other games for Reanimal certainly shines through, mainly in its 2-player structure. These games dont share much beyond that, but I still want to bring this comparison up because it leads to the important point that keeps Reanimal from being truly great to play. In It Takes Two each character gets a new gimmick every chapter that transforms how that chapter plays and combines with your partner’s gimmick in some kind of mechanic that is only possible by that specific combination. Reanimal does none of this. Outside of a few specific moments the core loop stays largely the same, and the puzzles are pretty limited in variety and approach. Its coop-first set pieces sit in between that loop, while in It Takes Two they are the loop. So despite the developers making it play just as well if not better in coop than solo, I am left feeling it couldve been a lot more. None of it felt like filler, but for a game this short that is not an achievement but rather an expectation.
the community: not just me.
Critics made the same point: for a headline feature, the coop mostly comes down to pushing or pulling things together, and only a few set pieces really need two players.
digging for the plot.
Going for very little dialogue and no notes to read was the correct choice for the type of game Reanimal wants to be. But with visuals this strong and a world this fleshed out for such a short game, more visual storytelling would’ve been greatly appreciated. Maybe it showed up now and then, but too incoherent to ever become a major part of the game for me. For a game with this much care put into atmosphere and visuals, a gripping story would’ve amplified those highlights immensely. What you get instead is a parbaked plotline and an ending thats a little too abrupt for my taste. The open-ended final cutscene doesnt help with that. Not every game needs a gripping story, but one with this much atmosphere and character would have benefited from it even more than most.
what holds it back.
I played this on a Ryzen 5 3600 and an RX 5700 XT at 1440p on medium to high settings, and my fps stayed above 60 most of the time with some dips in busier scenes. Despite these specs being far above the minimum requirements, the game crashed here and there and had a few animation bugs on the character models, plus some minor sync issues in the lobby between my friend and me. An example of this: his character would be frozen standing somewhere on my screen, and only after a few seconds would the game suddenly update his state, usually whenever he interacted with something in the world. Overall the game crashed roughly every hour throughout our playthrough. These performance issues regularly kept the atmosphere from reaching its real peaks.
4 hours for 40€.
A lot of the frustration around Reanimal comes from it being a 40€ game that is only 4 hours long. I understand that, but for me personally it was worth it. For a game with this bad of a playtime to price ratio, it needs something unique to redeem itself, and Reanimal has that in its atmosphere, visual identity, monster design and the niche of coop horror that you can actually roll credits on. Besides, calculating playtime per price is a rather tasteless way to measure art.
going deeper, with spoilers.
The monsters that stuck with me the most were the Spiral Whale, the Brook Horse and of course the Lamb. Most people would probably name the Lamb as their favourite, which is understandable, since you see it from its very first steps all the way to the threat it becomes, and the scene where the Girl gives birth to it is one of the moments I wont forget.
My own favourite is the Brook Horse, because its whole scene happens underneath the surface in diving gear. Its dislocated jaw and sickly face leave you guessing whether it has been rotting underwater for days or simply always looked like that, and the limited vision underwater made the chase even scarier.
The places I mean above are the cinema in Small Forest Town, the diving section, the farm with the pigs and the war zone.
the community: the piano soldier.
The soldier calmly playing piano in the middle of the war zone, shot by a sniper right as you arrive, is on screen for seconds and still became one of the most talked-about moments of the whole game on Reddit. That one scene sets the tone for the war chapter.
For me the ending read like the Girl got sacrificed by the group, my guess is they had no choice.
fan theory: what happened at the well.
The reading most players share: the Boy and his three friends performed a blood ritual and dragged the bound Girl to the well, the Lamb grew out of that sacrifice, and the flood that drowned the island is its consequence. Other theories go further. One says the whole thing is a loop of ritual, flood, Lamb and devoured kids that starts over again. Another reads the island as a kind of purgatory the kids never left, and one detailed fan theory maps the nine chapters onto the nine circles of hell from Dante’s Inferno.
behind the scenes: the story is there, if you dig.
A talking Spiral Whale with voiced dialogue was cut, and those lines would have revealed that the Girl was blinded, foreshadowed by the blind whale itself. Fans say the cut lines gave the kids the character the finished game lacks. And if you find all five hidden coffins, the post-credits scene changes: the coffins show the kids’ own deaths. That detail is where the popular dead-all-along reading comes from.
Screenshots and clips: Tarsier Studios / THQ Nordic (official trailers, Steam page).