REANIMAL, the latest game from Tarsier Studios that brought you the first couple Little Nightmare games, continues their work within this genre and demonstrates why they’re one of the best to do it. It’s an experience full of unforgettable moments and a crushing atmosphere that hasn’t left me since rolling credits, but is also one that is riddled with fatal bugs and severe performance issues. My time with REANIMAL has left me simultaneously amazed and frustrated that I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.

The game begins with a vision of a pit with children looking over it,before you wake up alone on a small boat in the middle of the sea. As you navigate through the lights, you come across another person who soon becomes your companion, and the two of you journey your way through a dark urban environment. Along the way, you adorn animal masks that clue you into the larger narrative, while the world is populated by hollowed out skinsuits and the monsters that inhabit them.

Like many other games of this style, its story is subtle, steeped in metaphors and heavy imagery. It invites you to watch closely as the environment says the most about what’s going on. There are parts that may feel a bit obtuse, warranting further questioning and analysis, but there is enough information for me to piece together a general idea of what’s going on. Visually, the game is a marvel to look at with Tarsier Studios’ ability to convey scale being carried over from their work with Little Nightmares and being expanded upon. Environments seem to stretch beyond what the main characters can seem to even perceive and they overwhelm. There is an awe to exploring these areas as well as a creepiness that never leaves throughout the playthrough. Effective sound design also helps to sell the setting and its inhabitants even further, filling all the roles needed for deep immersion.

The biggest strength of the game lies in its pacing. The developers have learned to weaponize it by interlacing moments of calm and moments of tension in such a way that you’re rarely able to get ahold of what comes next. Even at a brisk 4 hour playing time, the game brings you through so many emotions, using the variety of puzzles and environments to bring forward feelings beyond stress and relaxation. It often catches me off guard how many ideas the game throws while rarely feeling completely overwhelmed by it all. When the game is properly working, it’s so easy to fall into the flow and feel swept away by the journey of the experience.

This leads to the biggest issue with this game. I’m incredibly impressed with just how unstable the technical performance for it is. My first hour and a bit on this game was not spent playing it, but by trying to fix a bug that caused my entire system to freeze within the opening cutscene, forcing me to restart my computer through the power button in order to resolve it. Even after changing various settings on my computer, tweaking the launch options, testing other games, verifying the files, reinstalling the game, updating my drivers, and many more, the problem still persisted in only REANIMAL through several agonizing attempts. At some point, it just suddenly worked fine and I didn’t encounter another system freeze, but the problems don’t end there. I would consider my system to be medium-end but even playing it on low graphics, I consistently had frame drops that dipped below 60 fps. Additionally, I encountered multiple game crashes throughout my playthrough that required me to replay sections. All of this occurred after a recent patch that was supposed to address these issues, yet they remained.

Never before have I played a game that felt like it was actively fighting against my ability to play and enjoy it that by the end, even after recognizing and admiring the artistry of the result, I was more relieved by no longer having to experience all those troubles than the catharsis of its narrative. Still, REANIMAL is doing a lot of interesting things with horror and I’m excited to see how else Tarsier Studios can shake up the formula moving forward, but a crippling technical performance has prevented me from being able to appreciate it in full. It’s very difficult for me to recommend this game while in its current state that I’d urge anyone looking to pick this up to wait until all of these technical issues gets resolved.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Reviewed on PC