Reanimal Review

I haven’t played any of the Little Nightmare games, which Tarsier Studios sort of made their name with, although I’ve played their more colourful and hopeful gams, LittleBigPlanet 3, and Tearaway Unfolded. The team’s latest is Reanimal, a dark and disturbing journey of two kids wanting to escape a hellish nightmare-scape, and it was very hard to put down, with each new chapter introducing creatures and environments I wanted to keep exploring.

There are some elements of Reanimal being a stealth or survival horror game, but it’s one of the most cinematic horror games I’ve played outside of the Resident Evil series, and it does a fantastic job at pacing its various environments and creatures to keep you gripped the entire time.

As the game begins, a boy floats along a big open ocean inside a boat, soon stopping to pick up and add a girl who is nearly drowning in the sea. “I thought you were dead,” the boy says to the girl. Crusing along the ocean guided by lights on buoys, the two eventually arrive on land, a decrepit city in the distance awaits; a school run by bullies, and further, a war featuring soldiers seemingly from WW1 or WW2. The world doesn’t make much sense, but at every turn, there is danger, and the need to look for a way to escape it all, somehow, the guiding force to keep moving.

I played Reanimal solo, which puts me in charge of the boy; you can also play the game in co-op, with the other player controlling the girl. There are some slight puzzle elements where one character may need to hold a switch for the other to cross something. Still, the game isn’t slowing down the pacing for the player, and wants you to keep moving as much as possible, even if there are some secrets to find, exploring different angles and areas wherever you travel.

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Reanimal is broken into three acts, each with a big villain or creature chasing the boy and girl. The first is a creepy child-taking, ice-cream driving, slender-like-man, who will eat you up if he catches you. The second is a spider-like creature that creates evil children who rule a school, and the third act features a sheep that grows in size the more it eats, becoming a titanic beast.

Each act builds perfectly to a cinematic moment, including an escape atop a falling-apart train and even jumping into a tank to take on a beast. In between there’s plenty of either sneaking and hiding in grass, and under tables, exploring rooms to look for signs or items that help you piece together what’s actually happening in Reanimal, or slowing adding in more details about the relationship between the boy and the girl, and also the other kids yo meet accross the jourmey also looking to escape the creatures.

What’s actually happening in Reanimal, I couldn’t say I have a solid answer on. There is a core narrative that plays out with some sort of explanation for the kids, but there are also so many other elements happening in the background in each of the game’s acts that seem unrelated, or at least not directly related. Themes include child predators, school bullying, isolation, persecution, and even the effects of war on children. Or at least, they’re themes and ideas I’ve spotted while playing the game, without a way to piece together how it all makes sense standing next to each other, especially when you add in what’s happening with the kids in the ‘core plot’ of Reanimal. The game will give you plenty to think about.

I couldn’t explain the story to you with much confidence, but I have plenty of ideas and themes it’s had me thinking about since rolling credits, and I’m happy to keep digging into online discussions about what it all might mean.

(Review code provided to Explosion Network.
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