Tarsier unleashes first look at REANIMAL 

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Chilling new co-op or single-player horror adventure unveiled by the creators of the Little Nightmares series 

Ever since it was first announced that Supermassive Games would be taking the reins for the third installment of Tarsier Studio's Little Nightmares series (which received its own new trailer out of gamescom today), the question was what would Tarsier do instead? The answer, it seems, is to continue scaring the living crap out of us with a "more terrifying journey than ever before" in a similarly styled horror adventure called REANIMAL.

As with its (unrelated) predecessors, REANIMAL is light on story but heavy on thick, atmospheric dread. The game stars two "broken, yet resilient" orphaned children, a brother and sister who must "go through hell to rescue their missing friends and escape the island that they used to call home." Traveling on foot and by boat, the two must work together to escape the "hellish" place this island has become, overcoming a series of perilous environmental obstacles along the way. They'll also need to contend with a whole menagerie of "twisted monsters" that draw inspiration from "fragments of the children's troubled past" and now torment them as physical manifestations. The young protagonists will need all their wits and nerves of steel if they're to survive and possibly even succeed in finding "hope and redemption in the direst of circumstances."

While the developer's previous games have been solo affairs, REANIMAL offers the choice of either playing alone or with another person in two-player co-op, whether local or online. Either way, the game features the same sort of skin-crawling creature designs, brain-teasing puzzles and grim, dimly lit environments with a "shared, directed camera, designed to maximise claustrophobia and tension." You can stick to the main path as you traverse the game's variety of "mysterious locations ... each with its own story to tell," but intrepid adventurers are encouraged to more thoroughly explore in search of additional pieces to a macabre narrative puzzle, though doing so is certain to have its own inherent danger. 

There is no firm target release date just yet, but REANIMAL will be published by THQ Nordic and released on Steam for Windows PC, along with console version for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.