I want to preface this by saying Little Nightmares isn’t the type of horror game that has kept me up at night, but on more than one occasion I have let out a yelp and jumped away from my monitor while playing the first two games. The demo of Reanimal however, the newest horror adventure from Little Nightmares developer Tarsier Studios, had quite the opposite effect.
The demo wastes no time in immersing you into its world.There’s no introduction, no story to follow, you just wake up in a boat in the middle of the sea, engulfed by darkness. From there you’re given a prompt on how to sail, but for the most part you just have to figure everything out: where to go, who you are, and who you’ve just pulled into your boat from the water.
There is a significant lack of hand-holding throughout the demo, which is noticeable from the get-go. You’re given visual clues to follow, such as red lights floating in the ocean, but aside from that you are left to your own devices.
You do have an AI/co-op partner, though. I will say, it is nice having a companion who will occasionally help you out by walking over to a door and calling out to you if you’re taking slightly too long to figure things out. Outside of the quiet “hey” you say to each other, any other dialogue is reserved for the few cutscenes that take place throughout the demo, which keeps up the tension.
One thing I found particularly chilling about Reanimal is that you cannot move the camera, which means you’re forced to follow the characters rather than being able to look around corners or through gaps in a wall in advance. The constantly dark setting does you no favours either, and it didn’t take long for me to start convincing myself that there were figures in the shadow when there just weren’t.
You can get a decent way into the demo before you have to really worry about any enemies, but the overwhelming sense of dread you’ll feel from the music alone will convince you otherwise while you make your way around sewer networks and abandoned farmhouses.
The first “boss” you encounter comes right at the end of the demo. You’re not expected to fight back, so you have to essentially spend the entire time hiding and sneaking about behind stacks of luggage, praying that he doesn’t conveniently approach the pile you’ve found a home behind. The first time I stumbled into this encounter, I made the mistake of camping behind the one pile of suitcases the enemy would actually crouch down and look behind.
After hearing the tense shrill of strings and an inhuman scream from the creature, I genuinely thought I could run away and make it out alive, but this is where the lack of hand-holding came back to bite me. I didn’t actually know where I needed to go, and the lack of direction resulted in me quickly being grabbed and snapped in half before having to do it all over again. Even though this wasn’t the only time I met my fate at the hands of this beast, this encounter never lost its charm.
Just as you think you’re out safely, Tarsier chucks in a chase, which is arguably one of the things it does best. This sequence makes the most of the entire area, forcing you to run toward the camera and stopping you from seeing what’s coming up, like a pile of suitcases to jump over or the door you need to escape out of. Because of this, I relied pretty heavily on the AI companion I was with to guide the way, as one wrong move would mean being captured and having to try again.
Just as you reach safety, the demo abruptly ends, which was a not-so-gentle reminder that I was only playing a portion of the game rather than the full thing, unfortunately. From the tiny portion I played, it’s obvious that Tarsier has utilised what works for it in Little Nightmares and spent time polishing it to create a more haunting world filled with even more horrible monsters. There’s no release date for Reanimal yet, which means it might be a while before we get to delve further into such an unsettling adventure, but I can’t wait for when we do. As petrified as I may be.
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