Reanimal is a game from Tarsier, the studio behind Little Nightmares 1 & 2. This is a game that seem more in line with their own vision of what they wanted to make, where Little Nightmares seemed creatively strangled by Bandai Namco as a publisher.
Just like Little Nightmares, you play as children, running and fleeing through scenes in a world, where the story is told by the world itself. The world of Reanimal is dark, very dark. It is a world that desperately is screams at you from every corner, with its design and its gruesome characters.
This game is played as two characters. I started playing it with my wife, but she tapped out at the first boss. She found the game way to scary. So my 11 year old son took over, seemingly unaffected by the horror.
It is a cooperative game where you need to work together to progress, however it is not very puzzle heavy. I don’t think we got stuck anywhere. It is more a game where you need to do two things at once, like driving a boat and shooting harpoons. I do enjoy that. I’m not a big fan of puzzle heavy horror games.
I did not find the game very scary. There is a bit of body horror that creeped me out, and there are depictions of suicide that maybe wasn’t very appropriate for my 11 year old to see, but the game is not very scary. The atmosphere is thick and the chase scenes does get my heart pumping.
As for the story. I like the themes that are portrayed by the game, but I had a very hard time to connect the dots between the scenes. Where Little Nightmares was more of a continuous narrative told through the environment, this seemed more like loose scenes that didn’t have a red thread. I also didn’t enjoy the ending, and couldn’t quite puzzle out what it meant or how it fit into the game. That was actually quite disappointing.
Apart from that, I rate this game as GOOD.
