Reanimal Complete Xbox Review

First Impressions

Reanimal is a game that’s been on my radar ever since it’s trailer and reveal last year. As a fan of the Little Nightmare games (especially the first one) and also similar games such as Alice: Madness Returns from a few year’s ago.

With obvious design and atheistic inspirations from classic animated films such as ‘A Nightmare Before Christmas’, ‘The Corpse Bride’ and heck, even ‘The Thing’ the art style of this title fits the dark tone of the story perfectly. This game isn’t sunshine and rainbows in any way, shape or form. It’s dark, it’s twisted, it’s nightmarish and that’s perfectly ok with me being a fan of horror games personally.

Right from the beginning, the title screen invokes a tense atmosphere and then you start the game proper and that sense of dread only increases. Heck I was getting shades of ‘Bioshock’ from the opening segment as your character is plopped into the ocean with very little context to what’s going on or about to happen.

Plot

In the interest of keeping this review as spoiler free as possible, I shan’t go into too much depth concerning the story of Reanimal. Rather, I’ll just give a brief outline from my time with the game.

A brother and sister go looking for their missing friends. The story behind how their friends went missing and why you’ve come to this nightmarish place to find them is slowly revealed. Names aren’t used in Reanimal, nor in my opinion are they needed. You start the game as ‘the boy’ adrift in a boat with only the faint light from a nearby buoy to guide you. Progressing a bit and you’ll find and pull ‘the girl’ from the water only to be almost immediately strangled by her. After she comes to her senses though the duo continue on, following the buoys to a mysterious island.

Fear of the unknown, fear of isolation and fear of the monsters you can’t quite see that lurk in the corner of your eye when you turn around is the driving force of the narrative. This, and that things on this island aren’t always what they first appear.

Gameplay Overview

The main menu has four options. These are ‘Single Player’ and ‘Co-Op’ options, with Co-Op having ‘Local’, ‘Host Online’ and ‘Join Online’ modes. This, along with the much-welcomed cross-platform co-op feature means so many people, regardless of their preferred platform will be able to play and enjoy this wonderfully wicked and twisted game together. Although single player is available, where you control the brother with the sister dutifully following behind with her automatically interacting with items and parts of the game world when needed or commanded to.

Clearly this game is meant and begs to be played in co-op with another player, something I thoroughly intend to do. And fortunately, the game features a ‘Friend’s Pass’ which will allow one player who owns the game to invite a friend to play the entire game with them for effectively free. This is a great choice in my opinion and has worked really well with other online co-op story driven games series such as the ones Hazelight Studios have released, such as ‘A Way Out’, ‘It Takes Two’ and more recently, ‘Split Fiction’. But if you must play solo by choice or necessity, then the game allows you play by controlling the brother while issuing commands to the sister often as simply as pressing on the ‘Y’ button to interact. This enables the gameplay to run smoothy with no fiddly control scheme mapped to each character. Imagine a demonic ‘Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons’ style interface where you can control and influence two characters onscreen at once with only the one controller and you’d be halfway there.

The combination of cross platform co-op multiplay and the inclusion of the Friend’s Pass is obviously to help as many people as possible to experience this new title with friends and family, while allowing the title to get as much exposure as it can after release. The more people who play it and thus talk about it, the more people will be potentially tempted to try it for themselves. Word of mouth can be a very powerful advertising medium, especially when it comes to a brand-new IP.

‘Settings’ obviously does what’s intended. Giving you options for ‘Gameplay’, ‘Audio’ and ‘Graphics’. Gameplay allows you to change the ‘Language’ to one of several, ‘Voice Over Language’ having a similar option, with ‘Subtitles’ along with ‘Vibration’, Invert Camera’ (Team Inverted here for the win), ‘Crossplay’ and ‘Telemetry’ all able to be switched On/Off. ‘Audio’ has your usual sliders for Music, SFX and Dialogue volumes which you can expect from a deeply atmospheric title such as this. Next ‘Video’ allows you to switch between a ‘Performance’ or ‘Quality’ mode for your preference and a ‘’Brightness’ slider to make the game as gloomy as you want. I personally, tinkered with a few of these settings to get my playthrough feeling just right. It’s nice the developers have gone above and beyond to allow gamers to customize their experience here.

Finally ‘Controls’ is located at the bottom, which shows you all the controls mapped to the Xbox controller. Your main controls are Left Trigger to crouch and sneak which will be used greatly as you progress trust me. Then Right Trigger allows you sprint whilst on land, or to use the boats motor, with Left stick handling the general movement/steering and Right Stick operating the camera movement. Right Bumper activates your character’s small but needed light, and there’s many times where you don’t want the light to been seen, with Left Bumper allowing you to call to your companion. Finally, ‘Y’ allows your character to interact with the majority of things in the world, with ‘X’ to throw and attack, ‘B’ to drop items and ‘A’ to jump.

Gameplay in Reanimal is a mixture of walking, exploring and sneaking. Your character(s) are shown to be small, vulnerable, and isolated with the horrors that await you on the island. The game does this to great effect and that’s how the core gameplay loop is. You’ve got to be quick and you’ve got to be smart to survive what it throws at you. Using your wits and the environment to progress further. The locations, such as the trainyard you start in, are mostly areas where you explore and figure out where to go, with the game never really hand holding or directly telling you the next way to go. Only by working together can the siblings hope to not only find their missing friends but also escape the nightmarish hell of this island.

Presentation

Spooky vibes and dark and gothic is the style of this adventure game on offer here. The title makes very good use of lighting throughout, only showing the terrifying enemies often in partial so your imagination fills in the gaps. From the beginning you’re told very little on what has happened for your characters to be in their current situation. The game uses this to great effect, building the tension with minimum backstory and character dialogue. Initially also there’s very few enemies, which then makes the first few brief encounters even more unsettling. The term ‘less is more’ as used perfectly in films such as ‘Alien’ and ‘The Thing’, has definitely been applied to the creature reveals here. The first sections of the game I played for this review had very little in the way of real enemy encounters, but it steadily built as I progressed further until the first big creature reveal after much teasing.

Speaking of John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror masterpiece, Reanimal has some of the most body horrifying monstrosities I’ve encountered in recent gaming. There’s nothing most unsettling then being chased and hunted by a ‘thing’ were you’re not sure how many arms or teeth it has. Adding to the tense, chilling atmosphere.

There’s no HUD, waypoint or heck, even hint popups as you progress across the island. You’re left to explore and learn the lore of the story with sparse dialogue and collectables such as posters and drawings scattered around. Reanimal keeps you guessing from start to finish and I’m sure by the end of this ‘adventure’ (a very loose term used in this game), you’ll have some questions left unanswered I’m sure.

Each area takes the form of environmental puzzles to progress. Initially, these start out small like find a key to open a door but eventually start to become more and more complex, often requiring both characters working together to progress. In single player this is achieved by highlighting an item for your partner to use and pressing the Left Bumper button. Keeping it smart and simple for solo players. Later on, when enemy encounters start to happen, the game switches into stealth segments which really ramps up the tension and scare factor. Your characters will often meet a grisly end (trust me), but there’s a generous check point and save game system at work here for when the inevitable happens. Each death however, allows you to learn and adapt for the next time.

As mentioned earlier, light also plays an important role as a game mechanic, as often the way ahead is highlighted (no pun intended) by a lamp, bulb, or some other small form of lighting. But during the sneaky bits, you’ll want to avoid light sources as much as possible and this is where shadows come into play.

The world has plenty of things to interact with, such as chairs to sit on and suitcases and lockers galore to open. Little touches like this makes the game world more alive and lived in. Likewise, the camera moves smoothly and swiftly switches from overhead         to close up, zooming in and out when needed to show you the scale of the world. But can sometimes become stuck in awkward angles, especially frustrating in some of the stealth sections or blind corner spots. However, during the often spontaneous chase screens the camera will click into place perfectly and keep pace with the frantic action.

Masks are hidden away in out of the way and secret areas so it’s always good, such as it is with all games of this genre, to go looking in every nook and cranny to see if it holds any surprises. These seem to be cosmetic in nature, unless there’s more deeper use for them I’m not yet aware of. There’s plenty of places where the path forward is obvious, but I’ve been playing these types of games for long enough to know you should always check everywhere and ‘go left when the game tells you to go right’ sort of thing. Useful tactic to remember as often, once you progress past a certain point, you can’t go back. Which can be annoying.

The Bottom Line

With plenty of claustrophobic feeling of dread and constant threat at nearly every turn, Reanimal handles the tense pace beautifully with a mixture of graphics, lighting and sound. Jump scares are used to great effect, really setting the feel and tone by starting off small, being used just enough to not make you expect them but still keeping you on your proverbial toes constantly expecting something to jump and try to eat, crush or stomp you. The style and look of the various enemies you meet as you progress is truly unsettling at times and the attention to detail in the dark worn down and decaying world around you is amazing, from grass and trees swaying in the breeze, to mud puddles splattering underfoot as you run through them.

Add all this to a tight, chilling and genuinely unsettling at times narration and it delivers something fresh and special. I was feeling shades of an even more twisted version of reality than even the town of Silent Hill delivers with how the story feels somewhat psychological aswell as deeply emotional. It makes you think, it makes you wonder and it makes you go ‘Eeep!’ many times.

And at the low-end entry point of only £34.99, it would be kind of crazy not to consider adding this title to your collection with the amount of entertainment on offer. The game is by no means the longest of its type, but it never feels like you’ve been short changed as the content, while it lasts, delivers an engrossing and powerful experience. Especially when enjoyed with a friend.

Whether you’re a fan of Tarsier Studios‘ previous games or even just a fan of dark, gothic style survival horror adventure games with plenty of atmosphere as a whole, then this game comes highly recommended from this fan of the genre. Try it, you shan’t be disappointed.