Reanimal Review – Little Nightmares Grows Up, Gets Weirder, And Finds A Friend

A New Kind Of Little Nightmare

Reanimal is exactly the sort of follow‑up you hope for when a studio walks away from a beloved series. Tarsier has not made Little Nightmares 3 in disguise. Instead, it has twisted that familiar diorama horror into a full co-op adventure about two mask‑wearing siblings trying to escape a malformed menagerie of failed experiments.

The shift from solitary terror to shared survival could have killed the vibe. It does not. When Reanimal clicks, it feels like Little Nightmares learned to harmonise. The world is still a towering, hostile stage of tilted camera angles, crawling shadows and creatures that move with that wrong, rubbery weight Tarsier does so well. You are still painfully small, still mostly powerless, still forever one mistimed grab away from a brutal fade to black. You just have someone to blame when it all goes wrong.

Siblings In A Cage

You play as two children in porcelain animal masks, a fox and a hare, trapped in a research facility that makes The Maw look almost domestic. The story is largely wordless, told through set dressing, looping background tableaus and the way the siblings react to the world. Tarsier leans hard on implication. Animal cages packed in dark corners, overhead speaker announcements you can barely make out, twisted silhouettes behind one-way glass. It is clear this place has been repurposed, then abandoned, then reclaimed by its mistakes.

The emotional core is the bond between the siblings. Little gestures sell it: the way they reach for each other’s hands in tight spaces, how one flinches if the other is snatched by a creature, or how they wordlessly cooperate to pull a too‑heavy lever. There is just enough animation nuance to make them feel like distinct personalities rather than colour‑swapped puppets.

Co-op Horror That Actually Needs Two Brains

Reanimal’s biggest gamble is committing to true co-op design. This is not a single‑player game with drop‑in assistance. Puzzles, stealth routes and escape sequences are explicitly built around having two active players, whether that is online co-op or shared couch play. You can play with an AI partner, but the game is clearly not happiest that way.

Crucially, the siblings have genuinely different abilities. The fox is lighter and quicker, able to slip through vents and make longer jumps. The hare is stronger, better at pushing heavy objects, holding doors and bracing collapsing scaffolds. Many rooms become little horror dioramas about asymmetric risk. One child must crawl into the monster‑filled duct to flip a switch, while the other has to stay in the open, timing distractions or readying an escape route.

The best moments are when Reanimal forces both players to do something stressful at the same time. A sequence where one sibling balances along a creaking beam above kennels while the other creeps between cages below is pure Tarsier nastiness. You are both whispering count‑downs, trying to time a dash with the pulsing patrol patterns of a lumbering caretaker thing shuffling through the room. You do not just share the scare, you divide it into separate jobs.

Even outside the showpiece sections, the level design keeps finding ways to make both roles matter. Early on you learn that the hare can boost the fox up to unreachable ledges, but it is later areas, with looping routes and delayed switches, that really flex this. One late‑game factory floor has you coordinating conveyor belts and crane hooks in three vertical layers while a stitched‑together watchdog sniffs around below. It feels closer to a deadly co-op platformer than the more scripted gauntlets of Little Nightmares.

When you are paired with a human partner and voice chat, this is terrific. The designers clearly expect some failure, some arguing, some laugh‑screaming as plans fall apart. As a pure co-op horror sandbox, Reanimal mostly delivers.

The AI Sibling Problem

Play alone, however, and the cracks show. Tarsier attempts to patch this with a context-sensitive command system. You can call your sibling to follow, wait, interact with highlighted objects and hold positions. For straightforward traversal or stealth, it works. The AI will copy your rhythm, ducking into hiding spots and mirroring your crouch runs.

The trouble is that Reanimal’s best set pieces depend on fine timing under pressure. Here the AI’s occasional hesitation or pathfinding hiccup can be infuriating. A chase where the hare must brace a door while the fox sprints down a corridor becomes a game of babysitting the pathfinding instead of panic. The game is never unfinishable solo, but it is unquestionably the inferior way to play, and that undercuts the sales pitch of a shared nightmare you can tackle however you want.

Same Old Nightmares, Sharper Teeth

Moment to moment, Reanimal feels like a natural evolution of Tarsier’s prior work. The side‑on but slightly canted perspective returns, with the camera gliding between planes as you move deeper into foreground or background passages. The art direction is superb, riffing on animal experimentation and cartoon iconography without repeating Little Nightmares’ gluttony and decay.

Creatures are the highlight. One early boss, a lab tech wearing a mask welded to an otter skull, waddles on all fours, craning its too‑long neck into vents you thought were safe. Later you meet handlers whose faces are completely concealed by smiling mascot heads, only for hands to claw out through the eye holes as they reach for you. Tarsier has always been good at finding the line between playful and vile. Reanimal lives on that line.

Gameplay remains rooted in three pillars: light platforming, environmental puzzles and stealthy navigation past patrol patterns. Controls are more responsive than the first Little Nightmares, with better jump arcs and slightly stickier ledge grabs. There is still some of that deliberate sluggishness when starting a sprint or pulling objects, but here it feels more like weight than input lag.

The horror pacing is excellent. Tarsier knows when to let you skulk in quiet corridors, when to hit you with an abrupt chase and when to reveal a new monstrous set piece. A mid‑game sequence in a darkened aviary, lit only by emergency beacons and the glow of dozens of angry bird eyes, is one of the studio’s most striking creations to date.

Controls And Feel Across Platforms

On a DualSense controller, Reanimal is a pleasure. The slight resistance on the triggers when you hold your sibling’s hand or brace against a door adds a subtle tactile layer. Haptic rumbles trace the footsteps of approaching enemies, and the tiny speaker is used sparingly for whispered cues. Stick aiming for spotlight sequences and thrown objects is tight, and the default dead zones feel tuned correctly.

On Xbox Series controllers the experience is comparably solid, if less embellished. Rumble is strong and directional, and the game makes good use of the impulse triggers when jumping across flimsy planks or landing heavy drops. Button layout is identical by default, though the option menu lets you swap grab and sprint if you prefer the Little Nightmares muscle memory.

On Switch 2 the Joy‑Con equivalent has slightly looser sticks, and you feel it during sections that demand precise diagonal movement. It is never ruinous, but combined with the lower frame rate, some chase sequences can feel mushier here than on the other consoles. Handheld play benefits from the game’s strong contrast and bold silhouettes. You can comfortably follow the action on a smaller screen, though some of the more crowded background detail gets lost.

On PC, Reanimal supports both controller and keyboard and mouse. The latter is serviceable but clearly secondary; analog movement and the feel of holding a dedicated grab button simply suit the design better. Mouse aiming for object throws is snappier than on pad, which makes a couple of late‑game puzzles pleasantly easier.

Performance: A Tale Of Four Platforms

On PlayStation 5, Reanimal targets 60 frames per second in its performance mode and holds it nearly all the time at a dynamic 4K resolution. There are minor dips during some of the busiest wide shots, but nothing that affects inputs. A fidelity mode locks resolution higher and adds subtly nicer volumetric fog and shadow softness at 30 frames per second, but the game’s twitchier escape sequences feel far better at 60.

Xbox Series X mirrors the PS5 performance mode. Dynamic 4K, 60 frames per second, with only fleeting drops into the high 50s when particle effects spike. Series S settles for a lower dynamic resolution around 1440p at 60 frames per second, with textures and ambient occlusion dialed back. It is still a clean presentation, but side by side you can see softer edges and slightly flatter lighting.

Nintendo’s Switch 2 is the weakest of the consoles, though not disastrously so. Docked, Reanimal runs at 40 to 60 frames per second with a dynamic resolution that often hovers around 1080p but can drop below in effects‑heavy scenes. Portable mode shifts resolution down further and caps at 40 frames per second. Animations retain their weight, but the inconsistent frame pacing occasionally turns those exquisitely choreographed chases into stuttery ordeals. The horror survives, the precision suffers.

PC is predictably the most flexible. On a mid‑range machine with a current mid‑tier GPU you can comfortably push higher resolutions at 60 frames per second or more. Ultrawide support is welcome and the image scaling options work well. There are still some shader compilation hitches on the first run through new areas, though a pre‑compilation option helps reduce them.

Regardless of platform, loading times are brief and checkpoints are generous. Tarsier understands that dying to a misjudged grab is scary once and tedious if you are stuck in a long reload loop.

Sidebar: The Console Demo

It is worth calling out the free console demo, because it is an honest slice of the game rather than a vertically sliced marketing reel. Available on PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2, the demo covers the opening chapter through the first major chase, about 45 minutes to an hour depending on how thoroughly you explore.

The demo is fully playable in online or local co-op, and all three console versions capture their platform strengths and weaknesses. On PS5 and Xbox, the performance is almost identical to the final game, making the demo a reliable test of whether the slightly heavier, more deliberate controls are your speed. On Switch 2, you already see occasional frame pacing stumbles during the chase segment that are slightly more pronounced in the full release, so it serves as a fair warning.

Progress does not carry over, but learning the early puzzles in the demo does help smooth out the opening when you eventually start the full game. It also makes clear just how much better the experience is with a human partner versus the AI.

Verdict

Reanimal successfully answers the big question that has hung over Tarsier since Little Nightmares: what do you do for an encore? The answer is build a new nightmare around partnership, then weaponise that partnership for tension. When played with a friend on a current-gen machine, this is one of the most inventive, exquisite horror experiences Tarsier has crafted.

It is not without missteps. Solo play often feels like the wrong way to approach a game that is otherwise so co-op native, and the Switch 2 version lags uncomfortably far behind its peers. Yet the strength of the art direction, the sharpness of the level design and the way the siblings’ abilities interlock to create real teamwork make those flaws easier to forgive.

If you are coming from Little Nightmares and wondering whether Reanimal captures that same anxious, oppressive magic, the answer is yes. It just asks you to share the fear.

Score: 9/10