Reanimal Review – Little Nightmares’ Spiritual Successor Delivers

Tarsier Studios built its reputation on Little Nightmares and its sequel — two of the most atmospheric horror games of the last decade. After Bandai Namco handed the franchise to another developer, Tarsier went independent and poured that creative energy into Reanimal, a co-op horror adventure that launched on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. It sits at an 80-83 on Metacritic, an 81 on OpenCritic, and 78% Mostly Positive on Steam. Here is our verdict on whether Reanimal is worth your time and money.

The short answer: it depends on what you value most. If atmosphere and art direction are your priority, Reanimal is exceptional. If you need a certain number of hours per dollar spent, the math gets uncomfortable fast.

Art Direction That Punches Above Its Weight

Let us start with what Reanimal does brilliantly, because it does it better than almost anything else this year. The visual design is stunning. Every environment feels like a living illustration — handcrafted interiors that blend the mundane with the monstrous, outdoor spaces where nature has been twisted into something both beautiful and deeply wrong. Tarsier’s artists understand that horror lives in the details: a child’s drawing pinned to a wall in a room that should not have children, a dinner table set for guests who clearly are not human, shadows that move when nothing should be casting them.

The creature design is equally impressive. Without spoiling specific encounters, Reanimal features some of the most unsettling enemy designs since the original Little Nightmares. These are not jump-scare machines. They are slow, deliberate presences that dominate their spaces and force you to navigate around them with careful timing and spatial awareness. Eurogamer awarded it a 4/5, noting the “masterful environmental storytelling that makes every room feel like a puzzle box of dread.”

Co-Op That Elevates the Experience

Reanimal is designed from the ground up as a two-player co-op experience. One player controls a child, the other controls a large, mysterious creature companion. The asymmetric gameplay is the game’s most inventive feature: the child can fit through small spaces, solve certain puzzles, and hide from enemies. The creature can move heavy objects, absorb damage, and access areas the child cannot.

Puzzles require genuine coordination between both players. The best moments in Reanimal are when you and your co-op partner are communicating frantically while an enemy patrols nearby, trying to synchronize your movements across different parts of the same space. It is tense, it is rewarding, and it creates shared memories that solo games simply cannot replicate.

The game can be played solo with AI controlling the second character, and the AI is competent but not inspired. It follows you, performs required actions at puzzle triggers, and stays alive. But the magic of the asymmetric design is lost without a human partner. If you can play this with a friend, do.

The Runtime Problem

Here is where the conversation gets complicated. Reanimal’s main story takes approximately 4.5 hours to complete. At $39.99, that is roughly $8.89 per hour of content. For context, the original Little Nightmares offered about 4 hours at a $19.99 launch price. Little Nightmares 2 offered about 5-6 hours at $29.99.

The price-to-length ratio has become a significant point of contention in player reviews. PC Gamer scored it 74/100, specifically citing the short runtime as a drawback. Steam’s 78% Mostly Positive rating is dragged down by negative reviews that praise the experience but criticize the value proposition. “This is a $20 game at a $40 price point” is a recurring sentiment, and it is hard to argue against the math.

There is some replay value in collectibles, hidden areas, and achievement hunting, but the core experience is a one-and-done narrative. A second playthrough does not reveal new content or branching paths. You are paying for quality over quantity, and whether that trade-off works for you is a personal calculation.

Technical Issues Tarnish the Launch

Reanimal launched with a frustrating number of technical problems that meaningfully impact the experience. AMD GPU users have reported crashes to desktop, particularly with older RDNA1 cards. Several players have encountered progression-breaking softlocks in the game’s third and fourth chapters, requiring a checkpoint restart that can erase 15-20 minutes of progress. Co-op sessions are fragile: disconnections during certain puzzle sequences can desync the game state, forcing both players to reload from the last checkpoint.

The most egregious issue is performance on lower-end hardware. Some PC players report sub-20 FPS in the game’s most visually complex areas, even with settings reduced to medium. Console performance is more stable, but the PS5 version has its own issues with occasional texture pop-in during area transitions.

Perhaps most frustrating, the Friend’s Pass feature — which would allow a second player to join co-op without owning the game — was missing from the PC version at launch. Tarsier has confirmed it will be patched in, but its absence at launch means both PC players need to own a copy to play together. Console versions include Friend’s Pass from day one.

How It Compares to Little Nightmares

Reanimal is not Little Nightmares 3, but it is clearly made by the same team. The DNA is unmistakable in the environmental design, the sense of scale, and the way it uses silence and negative space to build tension. Where it differs is in the co-op focus, which gives the horror a more collaborative and less isolating quality. Whether that is an improvement depends on what drew you to Tarsier’s previous work.

If you loved Little Nightmares for its lonely, oppressive atmosphere, Reanimal’s co-op design dilutes that somewhat. If you loved it for the art direction and puzzle-platforming, Reanimal delivers those elements at an even higher level of craft.