Reanimal is coming at us in a weird way, and there’s really no avoiding that. This is a game made by members of the original Little Nightmares team, clearly pulling from the same design DNA, and releasing into a world where Little Nightmares 3 also exists. It’s impossible not to compare the two, and even harder not to view Reanimal as a response, intentional or not. It feels like a game that exists to quietly ask a question: was it the series that mattered, or the team behind the original idea that made it? After spending a good amount of time with Reanimal, the answer lands somewhere in the frustrating middle, leaning toward the team.
On paper, Reanimal sounds like it’s setting itself up for success. You play as two siblings returning to an island that was once home. Something terrible happened there while they were gone, an incident big enough to fracture the island into three massive sections and leave it crawling with things that very much do not want you there. Within each section, there are friends waiting to be rescued, and as you move through these broken spaces, the truth behind what happened to the island slowly comes into focus. It’s familiar, but familiar isn’t a bad thing when the foundation is solid.
The issue is that Reanimal doesn’t seem all that interested in telling its story in a clear or consistent way. It leans heavily into vibes and atmosphere, and often feels like it is at the expense of any real narrative momentum. There are long stretches where the story feels outright nonexistent. This is especially true early on, when there is a solid chunk of time where it feels like the developers chose mood over context entirely. That approach can work, and it has worked before, but here it starts to feel hollow when there is nothing grounding those moments beyond “this is creepy.”
“The issue is that Reanimal doesn’t seem all that interested in telling its story in a clear or consistent way.”
That lack of grounding makes it harder to care about what is actually happening. You are moving forward because the game tells you to, not because you are invested in the mystery. The fragments of the story that do surface feel underdeveloped, like connective tissue that never fully forms. Instead of pulling you deeper into the world, it often leaves you detached, watching unsettling imagery go by without really understanding why any of it matters.
That detachment is only made worse by Reanimal’s biggest recurring problem: how slow everything is. When I reviewed Little Nightmares 3, one of my biggest complaints was the pacing and mechanical slowness, and it is disappointing to say the same criticism applies here. Movement is slow. Interactions are slow. Animations are slow. Respawning after failure is slow. There is a deliberate sluggishness baked into every action, and while that is clearly meant to add weight and tension, it more often just feels like friction.
The most obvious examples are actions you’ll repeat constantly throughout the game. Opening doors locks you into a long animation where your character struggles, steps through, and then slowly turns around to let the other sibling follow. Lifting one character to a ledge is even worse. One sibling climbs up at a crawl, pauses, turns, bends down, and then finally helps the other up, and it just feels completely disconnected from the horror going on around you. The first time these animations play out, it’s fine. The siblings may be getting used to the action, but having to do it repeatedly quickly turns it into a chore.
I played Reanimal in single-player, controlling one character while the other was AI-controlled, and it’s hard not to wonder if some of the scares and frustrations would be lessened in a co-op setting. Even so, the sluggishness wouldn’t disappear just because another player is present. When a game relies so heavily on tension and timing, forcing players to sit through drawn-out animations over and over again starts to kill the momentum. Horror needs pressure, and Reanimal constantly lets the air out of the room.
And yet, despite all of that, Reanimal has moments where it absolutely works. When the game leans fully into horror, it’s genuinely effective. The world is oppressive, uncomfortable, and constantly threatening. After your first real encounter with the creatures that inhabit the island, there’s a lingering sense that you are never safe. The best way I can describe some of them is as ironed-out skin people, stretched and smoothed into something that barely resembles a human being. Once they’re introduced, it feels like they could show up anywhere, and that paranoia sticks with you.
That unease is amplified by the larger threats that stalk the island. Early on, you’re introduced to one of the game’s standout horrors, the ice cream man. Without spoiling too much, he’s exactly the kind of grotesque, wrong-feeling presence this genre thrives on, slithering in and out of bloated corpses and moving through the environment in ways that feel unnatural. He immediately establishes himself as a serious threat. His introduction is spectacular in the worst way, forcing you to quickly understand how vulnerable you really are.
“Horror needs pressure, and Reanimal constantly lets the air out of the room.”
Moving around in spaces where he’s present is pure tension. Timing your movement with the noises happening in the area and hiding while he searches for something makes every step forward feel dangerous. This is where Reanimal shines the brightest. Like Little Nightmares before it, the real threat isn’t combat, it’s presence. The enemies define the spaces they occupy, and simply moving through the world becomes stressful in the best possible way.
There’s one moment that perfectly encapsulates what Reanimal does well. As you walk toward a gate, the camera subtly pans upward. At first, it’s not clear what it’s trying to show you. Then you see it: the ice cream man tearing down a street straight toward you. I jumped. I actually screamed. There are moments like this where it’s executed so well that it lands hard. Reanimal is excellent at staging these moments, using camera movement and framing to let the horror hit without relying on cheap tricks.
Visually, the game fully commits to its grim, unsettling aesthetic. Everything feels decayed and slightly off, from the environments to the way characters move. The denizens of the island slink and crawl in ways that feel deeply inhuman, making them uncomfortable to watch even when they are not actively chasing you. It’s not outright disgusting, but it’s close enough to make your skin crawl, which feels very intentional.
All of this makes it even more frustrating when the game’s movement and pacing get in the way. The horror is there. The atmosphere is there. The tension is there. But it’s constantly undercut by how long it takes to do anything. When you know exactly what you need to do to survive, but the game insists on moving at its own slow pace, fear starts to turn into annoyance. Reanimal flirts with that line throughout its entire runtime.
Reanimal feels like a breath of fresh air being breathed into the Little Nightmares formula, and while it attempts to recapture that magic, it does struggle to keep it alive. There’s a lot to appreciate here, especially for fans of atmospheric horror, but there’s also a sense that Reanimal never quite reaches its full potential.
