It was, for a few days, difficult for me to figure out exactly why my time with Reanimal was so exciting. When it was first announced by Tarsier Studios, the team behind Little Nightmares 1 and 2, I thought it was striking how much it resembled the team’s prior series–one which had since been handed to Supermassive. I played both Supermassive’s Little Nightmares 3 and Tarsier’s Reanimal in the same week, and though my time with Reanimal was limited to a demo of about 20 minutes, I came away much more impressed by it than I was by Little Nightmares 3.
As I wrote in my Little Nightmares 3 review, I liked the game. It’s good; it looks gorgeous like the others, and as the first in the series to offer co-op, it offers a welcome change of pace from what was otherwise a very familiar experience. But I was floored by Reanimal’s demo, which is now available publicly during the latest iteration of Steam Next Fest.
For a few days, I’ve been wrestling with why Reanimal is so much more immersive and affecting. They both have excellent, full-bodied audio design that toys with creaks, echoes, and unsettling stillness expertly. Generally, their puzzle designs are similar too, with both offering optional co-op (or an AI ally) as players work together to survive a hostile land of monsters that come in various shapes and sizes.
So what makes Reanimal more than another Little Nightmares by a different name? It comes down to just how grimy the world is. Little Nightmares 3–and even Little Nightmares 2–got away from the first game’s especially morbid, skin-crawling monsters, or Residents, as they’re called. The Reanimal demo feels like a return to form for Tarsier, which had already seemed to pull some punches in its 2021 sequel. Supermassive only went further down that road, making the world feel more sanitized than it should, given its roots. I’ve yearned for a game to get us back to those roots. Reanimal’s slithering skin suits, inky black waters, ever-present unease, and air of mystery combine to give me the sense that this is the game that will get us there.
In the days since I published my Little Nightmares 3 review, my phone has been spamming me with Reddit push notifications, directing me to threads in which other players echo many of my thoughts on the game, so it seems there’s a groundswell of people who shared the same sanitization concerns I had. If you count yourself among them, make time for the Reanimal demo. I’m certain it’s going to be more to your liking.
Beyond being especially creepy in the way Tarsier once made famous, Reanimal offers a few other wrinkles that separate it from the team’s lineage. For one, characters speak now. It doesn’t seem to happen often, but a bit of dialogue went a long way in my demo. It didn’t feel out of place, given how sparingly it was used.
Another noticeable change is the camera work. As a series, Little Nightmares is essentially a side-scrolling 2.5D platformer that sometimes switches things up to pull players up or down tunnels and hallways, toward or away from the camera. Reanimal’s demo showed off a lot more dynamism in its perspective. Sometimes the camera pulled far away; other times it was practically a third-person over-the-shoulder experience. By shifting the dynamics, Tarsier is able to experiment more with puzzle design and exploration, which may help eventually separate it from the Little Nightmares comparisons.
I hesitated to even make the comparison at first, but it’s too obvious to ignore. More importantly, I find that Reanimal’s differences are what really matter, and thus calling out that connective tissue highlights why Reanimal is a game worth being very excited about. Those became my prevailing thought by the time I excitedly finished the demo. This isn’t Little Nightmares 4, or “the real Little Nightmares 3,” as my Reddit notifications have sometimes suggested to me. This is Tarsier building on what it learned from creating Little Nightmares. It’ll appeal to many of the same players, but this feels darker, more dangerous, and certainly more memorable.
