Reanimal Review: The Creators of Little Nightmares Have Made Something Scarier

Tarsier Studios — the team behind Little Nightmares — have outdone themselves. Reanimal is not just a successor in spirit: it is a more ambitious, more disturbing, and more technically impressive horror experience that pushes everything that made Little Nightmares great into darker, more suffocating territory.

The Premise

Reanimal follows a brother and sister trapped in a hellish, distorted version of their own home — a nightmarish landscape stretched across interconnected islands that feel simultaneously familiar and deeply, fundamentally wrong. Their three friends are lost somewhere in this world, and the siblings must work together to find them while evading the monstrous creatures that now inhabit every shadow.

Released on February 13, 2026 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2, Reanimal is published by THQ Nordic and has received widespread critical praise for its atmosphere and co-op design.

What Makes It Different from Little Nightmares

Little Nightmares was a solo experience — isolated, claustrophobic, lonely. Reanimal is built from the ground up as a co-op game, and that changes everything. Tarsier has designed a dynamic camera system that keeps both players in frame at all times, creating a shared visual field that maximises tension. When your co-op partner is in danger, you see it. When something is creeping up behind them, you see that too — even if they do not.

The result is a horror experience that is fundamentally social: the fear is not just about what is happening to your character, but about what is about to happen to the person next to you.

The Creatures

Where Little Nightmares gave us the Janitor and the Chef — grotesque but recognisably human — Reanimal goes further. The monsters here are hybridised, anatomically wrong things that borrow shapes from animals and childhood nightmares and reassemble them into something that triggers a deep, wordless revulsion. The design philosophy is consistent: nothing should look like it should exist. Everything should move like it knows you are there.

Gameplay: Platforming, Stealth, and Cooperation

Reanimal is a cinematic platformer at its core, layered with stealth mechanics and environmental puzzle-solving. The two siblings have complementary abilities — helping each other reach higher platforms, solving split puzzles, and creating distractions so the other can slip past a creature undetected. The game is playable solo, but Tarsier explicitly designed it for two: solo play is noticeably harder and strips away the interpersonal tension that makes the horror land.

Stealth is not optional — direct confrontation with the game’s creatures is almost always fatal. You learn their patrol patterns, their sight lines, and their reaction speeds, and you use that knowledge to thread through environments that are designed to make you feel constantly exposed.

The Atmosphere

Reanimal’s environments are extraordinary. The dismal grey colour palette of the early game slowly gives way to more varied, more wrong-looking biomes as the siblings push deeper into the islands — each zone maintaining the oppressive weight of a world where the rules of physics and biology have quietly broken down. The sound design is equally impressive: ambient audio that constantly implies something is nearby, just out of frame, just beyond the next corner.

PC Gamer described it simply: “Turns out Little Nightmares was not scary. Tarsier Studios was saving the real horrors for Reanimal.”

See Reanimal in action on the GhiciGaming YouTube channel — pure horror, zero hand-holding.