At The Bottom of The Well: A Reanimal Review

“Hell is not other people. Hell is yourself.” 

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

The perfect quote to describe Reanimal, the latest game by Tarsier Studios of Little Nightmares. Released February 2026, Reanimal is a seven hour single-player and multiplayer game available to play on Steam, Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. While Reanimal has the option of a single-player or multi-player game, it is best played with another person instead of alone. 

This game trades the terror of a child's nightmare, like in Little Nightmares, and focuses on the horror of war. Reanimal shows the desperate measures people go through in order to cope and survive such atrocities.

So here’s a quick warning if the mention of war, suicide, and other horrific topics along those lines bothers you, click away now.

But is Tarsier Studios’s first attempt at something other than their hit game series worth a play? Let's head into the trenches to find out.

Better Than Lovecraft?

Reanimal begins with the group of children looking down a well. These four children are Hood, Bandage, Bucket, and The Brother. There is also The Sister, who for some reason isn’t with her friends at the opening of the well. When you play Reanimal you will either play as The Brother or— if you have a second player— they will play as The Sister (both are orphans). If there is no second player, The Sister will still accompany you but instead will be controlled by AI.

Following that small cutscene you will find yourself in a boat as a boy in the hood with the remains of a hangman's noose around your neck. This is The Brother. He's adrift at sea and you have no idea where he has come from or where he is going. 

While you're on this boat and directing it, you must follow the red lights around in the fog. These red lights will lead you to where you need to go. For a small period of time, you're alone navigating this darkness and going buoy to buoy. Then you find a girl, your sister. 

But where are your remaining three friends? 

Demonic Possession

That boat from the beginning is the only way to navigate the whole map. There are occasionally times where you get to get off the boat and explore even scarier locations where you meet some of the most disturbing and grotesque monsters you can think of. Many of these malformed human bodies are allusions to the horrors that war brings. 

When on land you're never safe. There's monsters around every corner and you could die at any second, which would make you think the boat is safe. Once you reach that little boat of yours, and you're on that water away from everything, you're surely safe. Wrong. You’ll have to navigate rough waters, cliffs, and ocean mines. But that's not it. There's also creatures lurking in those waters, creatures that will kill you. 

Many of the creatures are animalistic and deformed. They're like saggy sacks of skin who move like spiders and will stop at nothing to end your character. The horrific ones for me were the Sea Monster and the Ice Cream Man.

Reanimal certainly knows how to set a scene. It plays with the dark fog of the atmosphere and makes the looming and horrific buildings come out of nowhere. It plays with the fact that you can't see half of what's going on and uses it to its benefit by using sounds and creepy noises to make you paranoid enough to turn around and stare into the dense fog. 

Even horror can be beautiful if framed the right way.

There's very little that is told to you about the story. In fact, you weren't ever told that the two characters you play as are brother and sister. The only thing you know is what their actions mean. The way they help each other up, the way they act around each other, it screams that they’re family. 

But there will always be that looming question. What happened to the brother and sister before they ended up in that boat? Why does there seem to be a tension between the two? 

Book Of Shadows

Reanimal’s story is a confusing one to say the least. But if you pay attention and try very hard to piece together what little information you are given, the story tells you one thing and one thing only, remember this. 

Remember all of this. 

Reanimal slowly gives you pieces of its story and makes you add details yourself to try and figure it out. Leaving the story very open-ended when you come to the end of the game. There are very few facts that are very concrete with this game. The only thing you can really piece together is that there are five children, that all have some sort of history, and all of it has to do with war. 

When you start Reanimal, you're completely unsure of what you're doing, until you find another child. This is one of the children from the top of the well. This child is Hood. Throughout the game. You will also meet Bucket—my personal favorite—and Bandage. It is your job to save all three of them. 

There's a lot of symbolism in Reanimal that you need to pay attention to. As a hint, pay attention to the animals and  how their bodies are deformed. They all allude to the greater and most confusingly horrific part of the story.

Let’s Split Up

Much like the Hazelight Studios games where you need to work together to accomplish tasks, The Brother and The Sister need to work together even though there's an underlying tension between the two characters. The Brother will sometimes help The Sister up a ledge and then The Sister will hold a lever to still a moving gear to allow the brother to pass, or sometimes you just have to lift the open metal trapdoor together. 

You'll have to fight side by side as well. Each one has their own little unique abilities that makes them a little more useful than the other. The Sister can attach her light to her waist while The Brother cannot constantly hold a light. Having a light source is incredibly important because of how dark the setting is. 

There also seems to be this weird tether between The Brother and The Sister that makes it so they cannot go too far from one another without dying. Your screen will start to flash and your controller will shake if you go too far from your other half.

Reanimal can be played alone, but it's more meaningful to play with someone else because you will have someone else to bounce ideas of what you think the story could be back and forth. Reanimal has a very open story. There is no right or wrong answer besides the key details you were told, which is why it's important you have someone else who can talk to you about what they think the story could be. 

Everyone’s Nightmare

Reanimal isn't all that different in setting an atmosphere than the Little Nightmare games. Which means it's not all that different as a whole. If you were looking for something different than Little Nightmares and stumbled across Reanimal, I have bad news for you, but if you love the Little Nightmares series, take a crack at Reanimal.

The Rapture

Reanimal is a good horror game, but it’s not the best at anything other than scaring you. I have a few issues that pull me out of the immersion.

The first is the loading screen. When you die, you have to sit through a loading screen to get a second chance, but the screen takes at least thirty seconds to come and go. Which in my opinion is too long and makes the player even more frustrated. 

Second is the lighting. It's a dark game, too dark. Even when you turn up the brightness completely and sit three feet away from the screen (speaking from experience), you still can’t see half of what you’re supposed to, making it easy to get confused and not know what to do next. 

My biggest issue however is the story. I love story games, but the story in Reanimal hardly makes any sense to me. The story is not as it seems and that's the issue. The twist, while brutal and horrifying, is confusing and leaves the player confused on what the hell just happened. At the end of the game I had more questions than answers. 

One Last Offering

I know I missed a good amount when playing Reanimal, but I don't think I will ever return to find what I couldn’t the first time around. Much of what I missed was small insignificant parts of the plot or collectibles. The most significant thing I missed was a hidden ending, which from what I can gather didn’t answer any of my questions.

If you loved Little Nightmares, venture into the new nightmare that is Reanimal.

My Rating