‘Reanimal’ review: this horror adventure is scary enough to give you little nightmares

You wake up in a creaking wooden boat, lost at sea in the middle of the night, with a sack on your head. Despite the sack on your head you – a tiny, virtually wordless child in a vast, dark and eerie world – steer the boat towards a bobbing red light where your sister is awaiting rescue from the waves. You pull her in, she attacks you. “I thought you were dead,” she sobs blankly and you both turn to stare into the thickening black fog, despite you, a small child, having a sack on your head.

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The whole small-child-sack-on-head thing should immediately alert you to the fact that with Reanimal, we are being thrown back down the dusky well of Tarsier Studios’ spooky Little Nightmares series. Those cult games featured plenty of strangely attired innocents who had to stealth and puzzle their way through twilit darklands full of looming horrors. Reanimal isn’t officially part of the franchise but it may as well be.

After our nameless orphaned duo wash up on the shores of a creepy island, their path through this macabre world is linear and uncannily quiet. You creep between shadows while mutant adults and animals hunt you down. We’re herded through gorgeous yellow fields to a deserted farm of giant talking pigs and a lighthouse full of birds from Hitchcock’s worst nightmare. We catch a ghost bus to a rotting school house plagued by dust children, but at least by then we have a weapon – even if it’s just a crowbar too heavy to be wielded with any sort of precision. In stranded warships we track down the eyeballs of weird beached whales and in war-torn cities, we dodge snipers. Deeper and darker we go, into history’s worst horrors while rescuing other lost children (we’ll call them hood boy, bandage face and bucket head) also drawn into a world which seems to be a physical recreation of their deeply troubled pasts.

There are a few side-areas to discover – often through wardrobes, definitely not Narnia – but by simply pushing onwards through this six-hour adventure you won’t miss much beyond collectible artwork. The puzzles are generally smart but straightforward (the key you need is never far away) and playing on solo mode, with AI controlling your partner, you’ll never be left hanging. An early tutorial on calling your sister for help becomes instantly irrelevant because, for the rest of the game, she just does what she needs to do anyway – often before you’re aware that she needs to do it.

This makes the co-op mode arguably the best way to play Reanimal, turning the sleek puzzle game into a chaotic escape room challenge as you and a mate try to discover the correct procedure for smooshing a giant sea monster with an island-sized gun. But coasting through it alone is quite a ride, whether ducking behind bathtubs to evade a head-chomping mutant or, in one of several pulse-quickening chase sequences, flattening half a city in a tank. The enigmatic storyline leaves many questions unanswered at its initial conclusion, but DLCs are promised which may throw more flickers of light upon this shadowy world. For now, Reanimal is a short, strange, consuming trip.

‘Reanimal’ is out now for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC