Tarsier Studios, the team behind Little Nightmares and Little Nightmares II, returns with REANIMAL. Online, it’s already being called “the real Little Nightmares III,” but that label doesn’t really fit. Yes, the DNA is familiar, but REANIMAL feels more like an evolution. Darker. Bigger. Meaner. And while it’s built with co-op in mind, it stands just as firmly on its own. This isn’t Little Nightmares with extra teeth. REANIMAL quickly proves it’s a beast of its own.
Hello darkness
Right from the start, you’ll notice the bigger scale and darker mood of the game. You play as a brother and sister who are traveling to an island (and other locations) to save their missing friends from a hellish world inhabited by monsters and deformed animals. During the first minutes, you’re dropped into a tiny boat in complete darkness, with only the vague red lights of buoys guiding you. Along the way, you find your sister in the water and quickly hoist her inside the boat. That’s where the cooperation starts: your sister can use her little lantern to shine light over the dark sea, making it a bit easier to find the shore. The opening feels bigger while making you feel very small and unwelcome in this dark world. It’s just a small glimpse of what’s to come, because this is by far the darkest Tarsier Studios has dared to go yet.
A lot of REANIMAL’s power and charm comes from surprising you with disturbing locations and enemies. I won’t really go into spoiler territory here, but it’s safe to say this is the darkest atmosphere Tarsier Studios has ever created. With a higher PEGI rating, it’s no surprise the team went all out to deliver a true horror experience. See, I’m a huge fan of horror movies, and I’ve seen my fair share of creatures and twisted worlds, but I’ve never seen some of the things this game does, and that’s a huge compliment. As someone who’s hard to scare due to overexposure, REANIMAL still had me walking (or crawling) slower just to stay out of sight of its horrific creatures.
The set pieces, the lighting, the absurd enemies… It’s all a masterclass in co-op horror, and Tarsier Studios really outdid themselves here. A huge portion of the atmosphere also comes from the adaptive camera. Where other co-op horror games often stick to fixed angles, REANIMAL constantly adjusts depending on the situation. If the game wants you to feel small, the camera pulls way back. If it wants you to feel claustrophobic, it zooms in uncomfortably close. Tarsier Studios handles the camera like directors of their own horror movie, and it works. REANIMAL is such an adrenaline-rich cinematic experience that it quickly became one of my favorite modern horror games.
Teamwork makes the nightmares go away
With the atmosphere and mysterious story setting the stage, let’s talk about the actual gameplay. First things first: the game is playable solo, but clearly built with co-op in mind. If you play on your own, you control the brother while the AI handles the sister. I tried this for a couple of levels, and it works surprisingly well. The AI does a solid job managing the second character, and the upside of solo play is that the atmosphere hits even harder. When there’s nobody next to you to joke around with or share the trauma, everything weighs down more on you. So playing this alone definitely doesn’t feel like a punishment. That said, I preferred playing it with my wife. It’s obvious this was designed around (local) co-op first and foremost. Before I go any further: yes, it also supports online co-op. Talk about making a statement there.
If you’ve played previous Tarsier Studios games before, you know the drill. REANIMAL doesn’t drastically change the formula, but builds upon it. As a co-op game, you explore dark and twisted environments together while staying out of sight of grotesque enemies and solving plenty of puzzles side by side.
What I really like about REANIMAL is the scale of the levels. It’s no longer confined to tiny rooms. Instead, you’re exploring larger environments to solve puzzles, which is a welcome change in pacing and also makes those puzzles a bit more complex. It never turns into a true open world, but the levels are big enough to hide secret rooms and masks, so exploration really matters here. The environmental puzzles benefit from the larger set pieces, and uncovering those with your partner feels genuinely rewarding. It feels like you’re part of a horror world instead of a horror dollhouse, and that’s one of the game’s biggest strengths.
Puzzles are a huge part of the gameplay loop, but there’s more to it than that. Wherever you go, there’s this constant unease from enemies lurking just around the corner, and avoiding them is something the game asks of you often. Sometimes you can sneak past by staying quiet, but more than once the game throws you into high-paced chases where every jump matters if you want to survive. In co-op, those adrenaline moments were easily my favorite. We were screaming from fear (and joy) when we barely made it out alive. The camera, combined with some peak cinematic set pieces, delivers some of the most memorable chases and confrontations I’ve experienced in similar games. Those are the moments that stick with you, and even after that, the game rarely gives you room to breathe. It’s an intense experience, and the team finds the right balance between exploration, puzzling, and tense horror moments. Opening the game up and offering bigger set pieces and larger environments was the right call. It makes you feel even smaller and more vulnerable, while also giving you space to explore. A special mention goes to the boat sections between regular levels. Those instantly reminded me of a twisted The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, letting you discover secrets along the way.
Some small bumps
As you can read, I’m pretty impressed with REANIMAL, but there are a couple of bumps worth pointing out.
First, although I love the new camera approach, it sometimes zooms out a bit too much. That can make it harder to see where you need to go and easier to misjudge how far you can jump. When one of you dies, you get reset not too far back, but the loading takes a bit longer than I’d like. I played this on Switch 2 and found those loading times a little frustrating. Nothing game-breaking, but it does pull you out of the experience.
Second, the game is very dark, so you’ll want a good screen or a dark room. I played most of it on my non-reflective OLED TV and had no real issues, but once I switched to handheld mode, the game became much harder to read. Keep in mind that playing on a monitor or television is probably the best choice for this version. In handheld mode, the game also loses some detail and runs less smoothly. Again, nothing game-breaking, but important to know.
Third and lastly, I did notice some technical hiccups like brief frame drops or lagging audio, but none of them stuck around long enough to break immersion. All of these “issues” are small bumps on a terrifying ride. And considering the price tag, I can forgive those mistakes.
Conclusion:
REANIMAL is Tarsier Studios at their darkest, and at their most confident. It takes familiar ideas and expands them into something bigger, scarier, and more deliberate. It’s not perfect, but its atmosphere, co-op design, and standout set pieces left a strong impression. One of the most memorable modern horror games I’ve played in a while.
