Our review of Reanimal, developed by Tarsier Studios. Available now for PS5 (reviewed), Xbox X/S, Switch 2, and Windows.
WHAT IS IT?
A (surprisingly violent!) stealth/horror title with a wonderful Burtonesque aesthetic.
IS IT GOOD?
It’s entertaining in its own morbid way.
WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?
Wednesday Addams.
THE HILLS ARE SILENT
Tarsier Studio’s macabre Reanimal, its first new horror title since the well-received pair of Little Nightmares games of 2017/2021, is an engaging, well-told, if fairly disturbing adventure, where the emphasis is less on the truly frightening and more on maintaining a generally eerie vibe. As such, it’s not as scary as fans might have hoped, though it definitely has its standout moments, even as its story is interesting enough to pursue on its own.
THE EVIL IS RESIDENT
From its opening, contextless sequence – a stormy rescue at sea – Reanimal takes off and rarely lets up.
Following the trials and tribulations of a pair of animal mask-wearing siblings as they seek to escape the clutches of a horrifying assortment of adult-coded foes, Reanimal offers a solid core of stealth gameplay, in service of a series of disturbing setpieces overflowing with dark shadows, slithering monstrosities, and quite a lot of blood and guts. The fact that these are children we’re playing as makes it all the more distressing.
Moment to moment, Reanimal plays a lot like a horror-inflected version of Ico, that classic of PS2 immersive adventuring. Whether playing in two-player co-op or solo (we honestly preferred solo, it contributed to the oppressive vibe), expect to spend a lot of time exploring expertly rendered environments – a coastal castle, a tumbledown cinema, a flooded city – in pursuit of doohickeys to unlock the next obstacle in your way, all while being stalked by a myriad of Burtonesque foes.
Although the aesthetic remains fairly consistent – grim, grey – throughout, this set-up does allow for quite a bit of diversity in terms of what you’re exposed to, each new area an opportunity for another new set-piece. One minute, you’ll be dropped into an extended homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Birds, while in another you might be easing your rickety motorboat through a flooded building while underwater monsters bear down on you. It’s good stuff.
THE FRAME, FATAL
Thematically, Reanimal revisits the Little Nightmares approach of “horrifying stuff, plus kids!”, which both lends it a certain sense of urgency – you worry more for these oddball kids than you would for, say, a lonely space explorer traipsing through an abandoned space station – but also occasionally allows it to veer into the unpleasant.
Frankly, it feels borderline wrong to see these kids subjected to certain of these environments, these visuals. The fact that they’re merely avatars for you, the player, makes it tolerable, but there’s an unshakeable “ick” factor, not present even in the previous Little Nightmareses, which were decidedly more tame.
Perhaps a fair comparator would be BioShock, in which you could – with a merciful fade to black – “harvest” the spirits of that game’s mutant Little Sisters, which at the time represented a rare dalliance with a relatively untouchable aspect of interactive storytelling. Reanimal, in which your protagonists can die in fairly macabre ways, does not offer such a fade to black, though the stylized art at least blunts the trauma of it.
That said, my main criticism is, perhaps ironically, the opposite: Reanimal fails to make death consequential. Checkpoints are frequent, and there’s rarely any cost to failing a segment and instantly restarting. Over time, this both encourages risk-taking (why bother trying your best when you can just instantly retry) and dulls the threat of foes or obstacles: the third or fourth time you begin the same chase sequence, it’s hard to get exercised about the giant snake dude slithering from up-screen.
Still, at a breezy five-hour campaign (with a handful of optional unlockables to pad out some extra time for those interested), Reanimal nevertheless earns a hearty Toronto Guardian recommendation for any horror fans. It looks great, it plays wonderfully, and it has enough spookiness – and more than enough entertaining set-pieces – to reward the interested horror gamer.
***
Final score: 8/10 Pugsleys.
Visit the official website for Reanimal here.
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