"We wanted to make something darker", Reanimal's developer tells me: "We don't give people the safety net of the charm of Little Nightmares"

Reanimal is terrifying. Evolving on the premise of controlling small characters pursued by bigger, looming monsters from the darkness that Tarsier Studios explored with the first two Little Nightmares games, it's familiar territory for the developer while striking out in its own, uncomfortable directions. After just playing the opening of Reanimal, I'm a little uneasy about playing more given how chilling the vibes are, while also being totally incapable of not yearning to find out what happens next, as all the best horror games do.

With Little Nightmares 3 releasing at the end of last year under a different developer, Reanimal is shaping up to be an important release for continuing Tarsier Studio's identity. But it's something the developer has been pondering long before the first Little Nightmares even released.

Dreaming small

"We talked a lot about that years and years ago, the idea of going from being known for a specific game," shares Reanimal producer and Tarsier Studios co-founder Andreas Johnsson. The first part of the studio's goal: "Quality over quantity. The idea that it's better that a game is small and good, than, you know, giant and worse," laughs Johnsson. The second: "What if we could get into a place where people long after the next Tarsier game instead of the next whatever franchise game? I do get the feeling now that we're closing in on it. I'm not going to say that we're there, but we're getting closer to that point."

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While Johnsson may hedge his bets on that recognition, reaction to Reanimal's Steam Next Fest suggests fans are definitely on board. Even after positive reactions in Reanimal press previews earlier in 2025, it was still nerve wracking for the team to push it out to players widely. "It's a completely different beast when it goes public," says narrative director Dave Mevrik. "You press go, and then [anxious noise] they've got it now, and they can think what they think with no input from us. For me, it was still quite unexpected when the positive reactions to it started to come in, like 'Fuck man, this feels quite nice!'" he laughs, "Like, people having such a good reaction to it when we still see all of its flaws."

Getting fans on board and engaged with Reanimal and what's next for Tarsier Studios beyond Little Nightmares has been "really cool, because that means that we're creating a very strong identity," says Johnsson. "We've had, had like, five identity crises over the last 20 [years]. It's really nice to see it's getting sharper and sharper. It doesn't mean that we're staying in one genre. It's just, there are a couple of threads in the kind of games that we do, the way we tell stories, or the way we don't tell stories. [There's] five or six, maybe, pillars or whatnot, and they're not genre specific or anything like that. It's more like ingredients that can link up again."

Reanimal has some similarities with Little Nightmares that will be apparent for returning players, but that's not the intention – rather, those similarities are just a part of Tarsier's identity, made up of the individual interests of all the creators that work there.

"It's always the same stuff that kind of inspires us," Mervik says. "The way we want to tell that story is always of a certain ilk, isn't it? Let's give the player a bit of credit, rather than do that second screen entertainment that's getting so popular these days. Let's give people's imaginations a little bit of room to maneuver and for people to engage with it in their own way. Apart from LittleBigPlanet," he laughs (Tarsier worked on LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway from 2008 to 2015).

After parting ways with Bandai Namco and Little Nightmares, "we explored different paths and ideas," says Johnnson, some more radical departures than the others. But, "when running a studio is that you need to make sure that you have the skills to make the next game. [...] You can't go like a 180 – well, you can, but it's extremely painful, doing a 180 and doing a racing game instead, or whatever." Whether that's for the community of fans or developers, however, you want to leverage what you're good at while exploring new ideas. "You want to evolve, because standing still, it's just not of interest, then you're just gonna go downhill. [...] You need to make use of the skills you've built up and the experience that you have, and you want to try out new things," says Johnsson.

One of the most obvious shifts in direction comes from Reanimal embracing co-op (which, coincidentally, is also the case with the Supermassive developed Little Nightmares 3). The idea behind having the option for two players is because "we wanted to make something darker than we've done historically, something grittier," Johnsson explains.

It might not be the most obvious mechanic to induce fear, but it has its roots in how we interact with horror across mediums. Co-op came from discussing films on the team: "My experience with Alien, for example – when I was way too young watching it – and how a movie, especially a horror movie, changes from when you watch it alone, versus you watch it together with someone, how it can help you watch something that is really horrific, and you can kind of nervously laugh at it together," says Johnsson. Having the option for players not to be alone means the studio feels like it has more leeway to push the horror even further, while at the same time "It can even be scarier when you watch a horror movie together with someone, because you're building up some extra energy between you."

In fact, he observes players have already approached that method of play with the first two Little Nightmares games, where a player might share the controller with an onlooking partner or child in what Johnsson calls moments of "pass and play". A bit of immersion breaking to add levity in order to process scarier moments. "I don't think it's a bad thing," he adds. "You also see how [players] transition from having fun in co-op, and then when something is starting to happen, then they're laser focused."

Beast mode

While in play, the puzzle platforming and monster evasion in Reanimal is similar to Little Nightmares, some of the biggest changes for Tarsier is in how the approach to tone and presentation has shifted. A move away from the fairytale. "We don't give people the safety net of the charm of Little Nightmares," says Mervik.

"[Little Nightmares was] from a child's perspective," says Johnsson. "The idea of looking into a doll house" was one of the major pillars for that series' development. In Reanimal, the camera angles in each scene are more unique ("also: quite difficult" to implement, Johnsson laughs; "Didn't think that through," adds Mervik), and the scale more realistic, even while monsters remain bizarre, surreal, and horrific, ranging from snake-like human skins and huge, tall humanoids that twitch around while looking for you in tight spaces.

Mervik calls Little Nightmares a "darkly whimsical world" even though "it was grounded in quite nasty stuff". But in Reanimal, "it's a bit more realistic, the way we illustrate stuff, the kids are a bit older, the themes are a little bit starker," he says. "It's not gone full Dead Space, or anything like that, but we've just pushed it a little bit further."

Darkness wasn't something the Tarsier was specifically chasing before developing Reaninal, but naturally came from exploring what interested them narratively. "The story you want to explore always dictates how you execute it, and the story we got invested in this time round kind of demanded [that]," says Mervik. "[We] wanted to blow the cobwebs away a little bit and kind of go, but we've done that – how about we go here? It just feels like you're stretching out a little bit, exploring something a bit darker, where you can't rely on that kind of nice musical box music to comfort you or anything. It's sort of like, 'Oh shit. This doesn't feel good at all, this place, does it?'"

But the team doesn't want to be dark for the sake of it, or to chase edginess. "Maybe when we're done with this, we'll just want to make Disney," Mervik laughs. "It's not like we're just on an express elevator to hell, with ever increasing levels of darkness, because that never goes anywhere great. It's more, what can we bring good energy to now?"

For me, I found the tall monster tearing apart a train carriage to search for the protagonists lit only by a van's headlights the most chilling – the implication that this thing can maybe drive around like a human particularly unsettling. "It's so subjective, horror, isn't it? People have been scared by stuff that I absolutely wasn't expecting," says Mervik. I have to ask what they've seen in particular that really got under players' skins. Mervik and Johnsson laugh. "Funny that you use that term, because that's the thing that's upset most people: the skins," says Mervik.

"My worst nightmares are always when the normal becomes abnormal, [when] there's something that's just off, that's just uncanny. Where you're like 'I can't trust this – this is the most mundane thing in my life, but it's not real'," says Mervik. The opening to Mulholland Drive is one such striking example that's stuck with Mervik. Avoiding spoilers, it's when "the abnormal just invades your normal place". Across Little Nightmares, and now Reanimal, I can't think of a better way to describe the unique mix of horror that Tarsier Studios has become an expert in playing in. When I close my eyes, I see those moments of tension and terror and I won't be able to rest easy until I can explore them again, inviting those moments back into my reality.