In Reanimal the night is long, the fog is opulent and the little girl on a journey vomits up a lamb that grows into a monstrously large, insatiable people-eater.
The reasons for this are obscure, which will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the output of Tarsier Studios, the Swedish developer of the first two Little Nightmares games. It has a taste for dream logic and for making abstract, modern-day fairy tales about children in perilous circumstances. The ones in Renimal are caught in a war machine, with gameplay that is an approachable mix of exploration, light puzzle solving, stealth, chase sequences and fights.
Reanimal’s opening moments conjure a palpable air of wrongdoing: A little boy, with a bag over his head and a rope around his neck, steers a motorboat at night for a short while before he reaches into the water and pulls out the little girl, who is wearing a rabbit mask. After collapsing in the boat, she attacks the boy — and then abruptly relents upon recognizing him.
Traveling on, they come upon a beach strewed with suitcases. They enter a nearby factory and end up using a plunger to extract a body from a toilet in order to find a key. The limp, elongated humanoid mass is similar to others that will soon slither along the ground after them.
From the factory, the kids push on to areas such as a cinema packed with an alarmingly dispirited audience; a laundry facility run by a deformed man who irons human skins; an orphanage overseen by a spider-mole-like creature; a series of trenches populated by suicidal soldiers; and a demolished apartment complex under sniper fire. Other children temporarily link up with them, although fate is not kind to the group.
Reanimal is differentiated from Tarsier’s two Little Nightmares games by the addition of cooperative play (which was also added to last year’s Little Nightmares III, developed by a different studio), as well as its darker tone.
“Little Nightmares is more about where does all of the [expletive] of the real world end up if you put it in a petri dish and leave it for 400 years?” said Dave Mervik, Reanimal’s narrative director. “What does it become in its most exaggerated self?”
The scale is different in Reanimal, he observed. While the kids in Little Nightmares are dwarfed by the objects in the world around them, Reanimal aims for something more grounded.
“How do you face trauma?,” Mervik said about Reanimal. “How do you go forward from a traumatic incident that came from a place of violence? That isn’t an easy or a cute thing to do. And so the game has to reflect that.”
Reanimal’s setting reflects its core theme of cycles of trauma, Mervik said, by making the game’s locations represent stages of acclimation to warfare. The mill in the beginning and its surrounding forest represent the industrial forces that drive war; the orphanage in the second act shows how the cycle of violence persists.
Planned downloadable content will feature two new children and offer players, in Mervik’s words, “a better understanding of the world where these kids came from and what they faced.”
The ambiguous story of Reanimal encourages replay. What makes this a welcome prospect are a number of gripping sequences — many of which involve animals — and the game’s striking audiovisual direction. A muted color palette suffuses most of the game, which the designers beautifully explode from time to time. During a rare early morning sequence, the children run through a brightly colored field to a barn filled with pigs whose lives will soon be cut short in a fire.
Mervik said that scene was inspired by his reaction to an outbreak of mad cow disease, during which piles of cows in bonfires were on the news every night.
“Everyone’s like, ‘What a tragedy!’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘They’re dying anyway, but you just don’t like the way they’re dying now. What’s the difference here?’ I think I kind of always held onto that annoyance with that hypocrisy.”
Reanimal was reviewed on the PlayStation 5. It is also available on the PC, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S.
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