Reanimal is a beautifully rendered haunted house that lacks the scares or activities to warrant a visit. The narrative around this game has been that developer Tarsier is about to take a big swing, but I don’t see it. Not only are they playing it safe, but I think this is a diluted version of the formula they themselves established with Little Nightmares I and II.
Developer Tarsier’s brand of horror, seen in the first two Little Nightmares games, has always been on the more tolerable side, with no jump scares and minimal combat. This remains true here. But historically, what the studio has excelled at is creating wonderfully horrid monster design, cartoonish body horror, and unsettling environments, combined with two key ingredients: tension and casual environmental puzzle-solving. Reanimal offers little of either as its brother-sister duo seek out their missing friends in an attempt to escape a treacherous island.
At least the overall structure for Reanimal works in its favor. It involves taking your boat to different spots around the island and entering various areas to rescue your friends. This setup breaks up the pacing nicely, and it feels good to finish a mission and exit near the entrance, back at your boat. There’s just something satisfying about coming out on the other side of things, literally and metaphorically.
That’s mostly where the game’s strengths end, however. The de-emphasis on puzzles feels like an intentional creative choice, as there are only about a dozen throughout the game. The problem is that nothing replaces them. As an adventure game, Reanimal never picks a thing to excel at, nor does it diversify its gameplay enough to justify the lack of exceptionality in any single area. Its story is too vague to be worth playing for the narrative. The production values make Reanimal look good when glancing at screenshots and clips, but actually walking, running, and hiding in its environments feels more like trudging through a simple set than navigating a hostile world.
I don’t hold my breath when I’m hiding from an enemy because they barely look for me. Nothing feels like a close call, just success or failure. I don’t feel the threats in front of me, even when they kill me. I’m not being hunted. Instead, I walk in and out of a hunting ground for short periods of time.
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Disliked:
The lack of tension and underutilized spaces.
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Platforms:
PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X and S, PC (played).
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Played:
Rolled credits in about 6 hours.
Reanimal gives you bigger areas to explore than Tarsier’s previous games, but does nothing with all that extra space. Rooms are deeper, and there are wider outdoor areas to run in. You dock onto small beaches, walk through an abandoned playground, and race across an open field, to name a few. It sells you spectacle but doesn’t deliver on gameplay.
In the opening hours, I wasted a lot of time running around looking for surprises, interactables, and collectibles. It wasn’t worth it. Often when I’m running through a grassy lot, going down a decrepit hallway, or checking the edges of a room, it turns out to be for nothing. And when I am rewarded, it feels more like a happenstance than a discovery because for every time my instincts were right, there were many more times they were wrong. And as much as I love the cosmetic masks you can find if you poke around, it just wasn’t worth it after a certain point. It’s worth noting, though, that there’s also concept art to find, statues to light, coffins to find, and numerous other secrets to discover. They just weren’t worth pursuing to me.
I beat Reanimal solo but played the first two of its nine chapters again in local co-op (online co-op is also an option). The extra set of eyes helped me find two things I’d missed the first time, but neither of us felt accomplished with our discoveries. In Reanimal, you’re not rewarded for your observation skills; you’re rewarded for your ability to run your hands over the walls.
The real thing to do in Reanimal is to keep going. There’s little friction and even less intrigue because you’re not asked to do much.
Many of the spaces in Reanimal feel less like the products of a dying or disturbed society and more like an underfurnished apartment. The first town I went to was particularly guilty of this.
You enter a room with a few long tables in the center and a couple of knocked-over bookshelves against the walls. Your first time here, you just walk through it. The second time, a tall, lanky enemy with contortionist movement and a fedora appears. He’s the first major enemy in Reanimal and is known as Sniffer.
He crawls out of a body that’s seated at the head of the table, and since he was on top of it, I ran under the table. Nearby, there’s a door with a few wooden planks attached to it. The first time, I tried to escape while he was glancing under the table, but he caught me. It was then that I realized all I had to do was wait for a few seconds. He looks under the table twice, and then he stands up and ponders for a full 30 seconds before leaving the room completely. With Sniffer gone, removing the planks was just a matter of interacting with them, then waiting for the animation to finish.
Moments like this demonstrate the ways in which Reanimal leaves tension on the table. You’re rarely asked to do anything during these escapes besides run, hide, or wait. You aren’t sneakily accomplishing something while a monster’s back is turned, outside of a few cart pushes.
Tarsier could have gotten away with largely abandoning environmental puzzle-solving if finding or getting to the hiding spots were more challenging. Reanimal’s larger layouts also led the studio to largely do away with the verticality that helped make some of Little Nightmares’ chase sequences so memorable. Tarsier abandons old ideas without picking up any new ones. The result is a really limited experience.
Reanimal feels like a weak Disney theme park ride; you appreciate the artistry that went into the spectacle, but it’s not particularly fun.
One of the most disappointing enemy encounters I experienced occurred when I entered a laundromat where I could spot Sniffer ironing human skins, surrounded by piles of rags, bodies, and a few rows of washing machines. The solution was to hide in the machines while he looked around, and then run when given the opportunity, opening a vent on the other side of the room to head to the next area. Upon reaching the second room, which contains rows of tubs, hanging bodies, and two washers in the corner, the solution was to avoid rather than evade. Sniffer enters the room and, after getting caught by him a few times, I went back to the first room. Sniffer never followed me there, and when I returned to the second room, he had opened the door to the third room. The whole section was quite literally just a lot of back and forth.
A similarly odd design decision reveals itself when Sniffer rides a tricycle towards me, and I flee. After a few feet, his hands reach out to grab me, but they miss, and I escape. I then go back immediately to find that only his tricycle remains. I still don’t know what the point of that sequence was. It wasn’t scary, and it would’ve been threatening if he committed to tormenting me, but he didn’t. So much of Sniffer’s behavior makes it feel like he’s a scare actor in a haunted house who really needs to get to his next mark because they’re short-staffed.
Good horror is as much about what isn’t there as what is. It’s the anticipation. It’s the shadow or the screech that turns out to be nothing. It’s the way your senses can get fooled. It’s the fear that you can’t trust your own perception. And just when you’re sweating over it all, the monster appears—or worse, you never even see it coming. Reanimal’s approach to horror is much more straightforward, to its detriment.
Many of Reanimal’s setups are predictable, and my ability to see a threat coming makes it less impactful when it arrives. One of the earliest examples occurred when I had to grab a wheel at the end of a shelf-lined hallway. On those shelves were boxes, many of which had human skin suits draped over them. It was obvious that the second I grabbed the wheel the skins would attack me, and they did.
Even when Reanimal does manage to surprise, it fails to capitalize on it. For instance, in town there’s a movie playing at the theater. The second time you see the movie, the silhouette of Sniffer appears behind the screen. But that doesn’t amount to anything, and a few moments later you see him on the aforementioned tricycle.
Another such disappointment occurred whenever the game made use of striking visuals, but failed to make the most of them. Reanimal draws on a dark color palette, leaning on blue, grey, and brown to create a dreary atmosphere. But at one point, I reached the top of a long ladder and saw a huge, vibrant, densely packed field of orange flowers. I ran toward the unknown as the figure in the background slowly came into focus the closer I got. There was real potential in that uncertainty, but it turned out it was just a barn with a simple rescue mission that took a few minutes. A beautiful setup that amounted to very little.
The game’s design also discourages exploration by failing to visually differentiate between what’s on the critical path and what’s optional. Too often it’s a matter of picking between two doors. In these instances, I found myself opening each door, assessing each room, then taking a guess as to which was optional. These steps don’t take too long, but given the long animations they’re a pain to repeat. This, combined with the generally unrewarding open spaces, discouraged me from exploring once I got halfway through the game.
Early on, Reanimal introduces some basic combat mechanics like the ability to swing at sandy humanoid enemies and throw weapons back at bosses, but even that is just welcome busywork to offset a boring experience.
The highlight of Reanimal is its final hour, which includes sequences that differentiate themselves from the rest of the game by putting you in the position of being both the hunter and the hunted. And the conclusion helps give some meaning to the repeated images you see throughout the adventure that hint at its larger story.
If anything, this bright spot only highlighted my disappointment with the game even more because I know Tarsier can make a good game. Unfortunately, a handful of highs and a nice ending don’t redeem the hours I spent meandering from place to place, unmotivated and unamused.
