TL;DR: Reanimal isn’t the scariest horror game, but it might be the most beautiful—and it will live rent-free in your head long after the credits roll.

I’ve played a lot of horror games in my life. The kind that trade in cheap jump scares. The kind that mistake darkness for atmosphere. The kind that throw gore at you like confetti and call it art. So when I booted up Reanimal, I expected something moody, maybe clever, probably unsettling. I did not expect one of the most beautiful horror games I’ve played in years.

Reanimal isn’t just pretty “for a horror game.” It’s beautiful, period. And not in a glossy, ray-traced tech demo kind of way. It’s beautiful in the way a nightmare can be beautiful—like watching fog swallow a coastline at dawn and realizing you might not come back from it.

The opening alone had me leaning forward in my chair like a kid watching a ghost story unfold by candlelight. A small boat. A lone child. Endless water, mist curling at the edges of the screen. I steered toward a faint red buoy, the only punctuation mark in an otherwise blank ocean. Then a body floated up. It lunged. My heart stopped. And just as quickly, the horror twisted into something tender: it was my sister. Alive. Not safe, not okay—but alive.

From that moment, Reanimal made a promise. This wasn’t going to be a loud horror game. It was going to be a composed one.

Developed by Tarsier Studios and published by THQ Nordic, Reanimal feels like a spiritual evolution of the studio’s past work, but more confident, more restrained. If you’ve followed their trajectory since Little Nightmares 2, you can feel the maturation. The edges are sharper. The pacing is leaner. The cinematic ambition is dialed all the way up.

And yet, somehow, it never feels indulgent.

The thing about Reanimal is that it refuses to linger longer than necessary. Over roughly six hours, I was chased by bloated corpses, hunted by something spider-like and wrong, taunted by phantom children, dive-bombed by seagulls that absolutely woke up and chose violence. I snuck through crumbling buildings, scrambled across war-torn trenches, got kidnapped, commandeered vehicles that children absolutely should not be operating, and at one point found myself firing back at a grotesque sea monster like I’d accidentally wandered into the world’s bleakest fairy tale.

Every time I thought, “Okay, I get this area,” the game pulled the rug out. A new mechanic. A sudden chase. A perspective shift. It’s chaos, but curated chaos. The pacing is so tight it feels edited.

Which brings me to what might be Reanimal’s real star: the camera.

I know, that sounds pretentious. But stay with me.

The directed camera system in Reanimal is doing more storytelling than most AAA scripts. Sometimes it hovers at a distance, shrinking the brother and sister into fragile silhouettes against towering cliffs. Other times it presses in close, forcing me to share their claustrophobia inside a tunnel or abandoned house. When something monstrous appears, the angle drops, tightens, or swings wide in a way that feels choreographed rather than reactive.

I caught myself pausing constantly—not because I was confused, but because I wanted to absorb the frame. The lighting. The composition. The way shadows swallowed architecture. This is a horror game that understands negative space. It understands restraint. It understands that what you don’t see can be more powerful than what you do.

And the UI? Practically nonexistent.

There’s no clutter. No immersion-breaking prompts screaming at you to press a button. Interactables are marked with a tiny white dot, subtle enough to preserve the illusion. Movement, interact, use item. That’s it. It’s minimalist in the best possible way—like the game trusts you to pay attention.

As someone who lives for brain-melting puzzles, I initially braced for disappointment. Reanimal is, at its core, a puzzle platformer—but it leans far more into exploration and cinematic momentum than intricate logic challenges. There’s one proper standalone puzzle involving a hidden code. The rest are environmental hurdles: find a lever, unlock a door, figure out how to cross a gap.

And you know what? I didn’t miss the complexity.

Because Reanimal’s tension doesn’t come from solving. It comes from surviving.

Running is a language in this game. I ran from a haunted car that felt ripped from a fever dream. I ran from gunfire. I ran across a narrow chasm while physically tethered to my in-game sister, which is the kind of mechanic that makes your palms sweat in real life. But the moments that surprised me most were when I didn’t have to run—when I found a crowbar, or a stack of needles, or a cannon, and realized I could push back.

Not often. Just enough.

The sound design deserves its own slow clap. Most of the time, there is no grand horror score telling you how to feel. Instead, it’s creaking wood. Wind. Footsteps. Water sloshing against stone. A distant groan that may or may not be real. Silence, weaponized. When music does swell during a chase, it hits like adrenaline in audio form—but it retreats just as quickly, leaving you alone again.

The voice acting is sparse, almost hesitant. A whisper here. A question at a bus stop there. It never explains. It never overstates. The bond between the brother and sister isn’t told to you—it’s shown in shared glances, in the way they boost each other over obstacles, in the way they cling to one another during the worst of it. That restraint is everything. One wrong monologue could have shattered the mood.

By the end of Reanimal, I realized something strange. It isn’t the scariest horror game I’ve ever played. It’s not the hardest. It won’t break your brain with puzzles or redefine the genre mechanically. But it will haunt you visually.

I still see certain frames when I close my eyes. A mansion looming behind fog-drenched cliffs. A narrow trench lit by dying light. Children silhouetted against something massive and unknowable. Reanimal is horror as cinema, horror as composition, horror as quiet devastation.

It gave me a cocktail of phobias I didn’t ask for—claustrophobia, thalassophobia, the creeping dread of things that move wrong in the dark—and somehow wrapped them in something almost poetic.

This is what happens when a studio commits to minimalism instead of feature bloat. No bloated dialogue trees. No HUD spam. No overdesigned mechanics. Just atmosphere, momentum, and trust in the player.

Reanimal doesn’t scream for your attention. It earns it.

Verdict

Reanimal is one of the most visually striking horror games in years, a masterclass in cinematic game design that prioritizes atmosphere and pacing over complexity. It may not be the most challenging horror experience, but its haunting imagery, minimalist design, and emotionally restrained storytelling make it unforgettable.