REANIMAL Review

Tarsier Studios have mastered the style of platformer popularised in the modern indie scene By PlayDead, developers of LIMBO and INSIDE. They have created an unsettling atmospheric platformer series that gives just enough information about its plot/lore to be understandable while leaving things open enough to allow for player interpretation. What really sold me on Little Nightmares 1 and 2 is the environment work and creature design, giving the humanoid enemies unsettling proportions, such as the extended neck of the Teacher, the long arms of the otherwise stumpy Janitor in the first game and the slenderman esque TV Man who haunts the climax of the second game. The Maw in Little Nightmares is an incredibly designed environment, with how small the main character ‘Six’ is really upping the scale of the place and people. Little Nightmares 2 features several locations, each feeling equally hostile to the children you play as.

My hope for REANIMAL was for Tarsier to actually deviate from their comfort zone in terms of enemy design, there’s only so many ways you can distort the proportions of a human, or make the skin sag and wrinkle before you’ve seen it all before. Monstrous animals shown in the trailer gave me hope that they had done exactly this, choosing to distort different farm animals rather than humans. Act 1 disappointed me a little in this regard because the main protagonist is exactly what you would expect from the Little Nightmares developers. The Sniffer is a human with weird, lanky proportions who uses other bodies as forms of travel or teleportation. There are also smaller enemies who are just the skins of a humanoid slinking around the floor, and these are pretty creepy, but they are used sparsely.

There’s 2 things that help alleviate this initial reaction. The first is that this is Tarsier Studios best work, their cinematography, encounter design, environments, modelling and lighting is all the best it’s ever been. Second is that in its final act REANIMAL takes such a left turn (in a good way) that I was in shock for most of the final segments. The early parts of Act 3 contain some of the most impressive creature designs, a giant whale serpent with one eye, a massive horse creature that haunts the ocean, but the best decision made in this act is to set most of Act 3 in WW1 style trenches, with bombs, gunshots and sirens going off everywhere. The playable child characters are assaulted by suicide bombers, snipers, gunners and tanks. Somehow even the segments without an enemy to run from are mortifying, where the soldiers just commit suicide in front of you as the bleakness of their situation has become too much. It never lets up, never lets you feel safe for more than a small moment. Only one soldier doesn’t attack you or kill themselves, they sit in a building playing the piano, having a moment of peace to themselves in the middle of this hellscape. The sniper kills them the moment you enter the room.

This coincided with the final creature being a deformed sheep, at first it’s just a lamb that runs around and chases the protagonists and their friends, it eventually kills them one by one, it grows and mutates, becoming Kaiju sized at one point before devolving into a massive mass of flesh that takes over entire streets. The game’s animal monsters are not always tied to its commentary on war, especially not for the whole game, so I could be overthinking this but It felt poignant to me that the final monster is a sheep, since these kids and the soldiers that chase them are sent to be slaughtered in the warzone they have to navigate through.

I still got what I was expecting out of REANIMAL, especially in the second act. Once that first humanoid enemy was gone I got plenty of fucked up animal monsters, a Pelican, a Pig, a Weird Spider, plus the ones mentioned previously in Act 3. And those chase sequences and fights are extraordinary work, I just found myself more horrified by one of the most brutal depictions of war I’ve ever seen.