Little Nightmares dev Tarsier Studios announces Reanimal, a terrifying new horror title

Tarsier Studios, the developer behind the critically-acclaimed Little Nightmares series, announced its new title during Gamecom 2024’s Opening Night Live, Reanimal. The title looks similar to the Little Nightmares games but has a distinctly new and much more terrifying series of monsters to avoid.

While we were only shown a brief glimpse of Reanimal, it was enough to demonstrate exactly what the gameplay looks and feels like. Players take on the role of two tiny characters a brother and sister duo, and find themselves lost in a world where creatures much bigger than them lurk. They must constantly run, hide, duck, cover, sneak, crawl, and evade colossal, strangely altered animals in order to find some sort of small sense of safety while being constantly hunted.

Don’t stop running

As you can see in the trailer above, the animals in Reanimal aren’t quite what you expect them to be. There’s an anthropomorphic pig sitting at a table, seemingly waiting to eat the protagonists, something with too many arms for me to sit comfortable while look at it riding a giant trike, and a sheep with a body and way too long a neck.

Every monster is wrong in a way only Tarsier Studios knows how to make them, and that’s what’s most terrifying about Reanimal so far. The place where these creatures reside is where the protagonists used to live. They’ve returned because their friends have gone missing there, and they need to find them and rescue them before it’s too late.

The gameplay looks very similar to the Little Nightmares series, and is about as close as we’re likely to get to a Little Nightmares 3 anytime soon – or at least until slightly later in the ONL show, when Little Nightmares 3 did actually make an appearance. As you might expect, the game features a full co-op campaign for anyone who can’t bear to go into this spooky world alone.

What makes Reanimal so striking to me is the fact that Tarsier Studios has retained that sense of shocking body horror from its previous games, but moved into a new realm to keep the horror fresh. Making yet another game with Misshapen humans would still be scary, but we’ve seen it a few times already now.

Grotesque animals are unfamiliar, and that’s what makes even the mere trailer for this game so horrifying in the best way possible. While we don’t have a release date at the time of writing, this is a survival horror game worth wishlisting and waiting for.