Reanimal review: "A feast of twisted weirdness conjuring up unpleasant imagery and dark world building"

There's probably a good three or four nuggets of pure nightmare fuel to be had playing Reanimal. At times it's an absolute feast of twisted weirdness; conjuring up unpleasant imagery and dark world building. It's full of 'nope, don't like that' moments as various creatures and grotesqueries chase the children you control. And there's definitely one bit that's going to be burned into my memory for probably the rest of all time. So, yay, playable trauma.

But it's also a little disjointed and unconnected, feeling more like a series of vignettes shuffled together than a coherent experience from start to end. Individual sections are impressively crafted and full of the atmosphere you'd expect from Tarsier Studios, who also made Little Nightmares and Little Nightmares 2. But there's something missing when it comes to binding it all together. At any given time the thing you're evading, or the horrorscape you're navigating, creates a beautifully formed microcosm of nasty, but I spent much of the game desperate for some kind of glue to better stick it all together.

For instance, it starts with you being chased by limp, empty people skins. Their saggy, melted candle faces bearing down on you while pulling sock-like limbs and body behind them in a wrinkly trail. It's an idea that is explored in a range of horrible motifs – the skins are left draped across chairs and seats (mirroring the empty clothes of Little Nightmare 2), they hang from tree branches, and go through laundry where they're washed and ironed. There's also a solitary tall figure collecting them, who occasionally scuttles around like a spider, his limbs all twisted the wrong way, who can also apparently use the bellies of bloated, distended corpses as some sort of fleshy, rib-lined portal to move around. It's great and horrible and poses so many questions and then it just goes away and never comes up again.

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The story follows two children traveling through a strange and surreal world that wants nothing more than to end them in a variety of deeply unpleasant ways. Being forced alive down something or other's fleshy wet throat is an ongoing threat here. As is being crushed, blown up, shot, beaten to death, having your head chewed off and so on. The lack of anything on screen means you're occasionally prone to a little exploratory dying, probing the boundaries as you work out what to do. But the results are often so skin crawlingly 'ewww' that it's worth finding out the hard way what or where the danger is.

As you explore this surreal world, and the people-skin monsters give way to monstrous animals, spectral children, and something I can best describe as a hairy intestine with legs, your tools for survival are far more grounded by comparison. Stealth plays a big part, and a lot of time will be spent working out the routes and timings to avoid any of the fates I listed earlier. When you're not sneaking around there are some moments of combat, as you slowly swing a crowbar at opponents. It's a little on the clumsy, flailing side, treading a fine line between feeling frantic and desperate, and just a bit sluggish – the timing involved often develops into just plain button mashing and hoping for the best.

Terrible things

Puzzles are simple, and mainly consist of finding a key, or an object like bolt cutters, to open the way ahead. That makes sense with the focus here more about exploring and experiencing the world. You wander around. See some things. (Terrible things.) Then have a little breather trying to find a way past some obstacle. With Reanimal that could be anything from a locked door to a giant eyeless crying whale, or worse.

It's a surprisingly large feeling world despite the light feeling seven and a half hours it took me to see the end. There are vehicles to get around in, where you use boats, trucks and other things to get between areas. It's not free roaming in any sense, despite some branching routes and hidden areas for extras like masks and other collectibles, it just feels pleasingly wide and spacious despite being basically linear. (Although, if you're the kind of person that has a breakdown trying to second guess if you're on a side path or a main path about to pass a point of no return and miss something, you might find a whole other kind of horror here.)

At any given time it's a consistently artful exploration of making fairly ordinary things traumatizing – a recurring theme is ‘what if animals were all wrong in a variety of upsetting ways, for example – while exploring fantastical representations of various landscapes and settings. My notes are full of little 'ooh wow' moments. From amazing environmental reveals to beautifully staged set pieces. Being attacked by a homicidal cloud of seagulls in full The Birds mode was a memorable event; while an underwater section I won't spoil is one of my favorite horror bits of the year so far.

When it hits any of its several peaks, it's about as good as this sort of thing gets. The fixed(ish) camera sweeps and pans across the action with flawless direction, with a couple of lovely shots where it tracks through a window or door you pass through, framing your confinement beautifully in an absolute cinema moment. There's one especially satisfying boss fight that just feels good; and the climatic minutes are a proper edge of your seat thing that ends in a hideously fleshy full stop that takes a second to fully comprehend.

However, it just lacks a satisfying cohesion that, for me, made the ending a bit of a 'oh was that it?' moment, rather than something to chew on once you could look back. There's clearly a sequence of events behind everything that you'll uncover by the time the credits roll, but not one that really brings any of it together for me. I don't expect a game like this to give me all the answers – ambiguity and interpretation is at the heart of all good horror - but lacking a clear antagonist or overarching theme to tie it all up, playing Reanimal feels more like flicking through pages of playable concept art – horrific, creative and inventive, but ultimately unconnected. There is a good horror game here, and one worth playing, but one where any of its stand out moments lack the extra hit of cohesion that would bring everything together to form a greater whole.

Peek at our best horror games list for more frights!