REANIMAL (2026): Grotesqueries At Breakneck Speed

HEAVY SPOILERS BELOW, AS WELL AS DISCUSSION OF THE VIDEO GAME’S MACABRE IMAGERY, PLOT, AND THEMES. ALSO, BRIEF BITS THAT ARE LIKELY INAPPROPRIATE FOR THE READER’S PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT.

One thing I like about REANIMAL is how well the box cover conveys the game’s emphasis on scale with this complex front-facing image—The main characters wouldn’t even be discernible if it wasn’t for the edgy, sketchy, red (read: bloody-like) advertisement for “INCLUDES SEASON PASS + PRE-ORDER DLC” that features their likenesses, and the image instead highlights the titanic dual presences of the environment and certain animals, which gets at the heart of the experience you’re buying. It’s a visual that feels unique to me in gaming, where boxes typically highlight the player’s surrogate and often (I feel) little else these days.

There are some “issues,” like how this image, like the pre-release footage, spoils the twisted sheep from the end of the game. Furthermore, I think having the sheep and spider in such close proximity to one another here highlights an unfortunate (if perhaps intentional, suggestive of… lore?) homogeneity in their designs thanks to their similar human-like limbs. It also perhaps over-emphasizes a building that looks like the orphanage that makes up just a middle chapter of the experience, and the pig is similarly promoted to the level of major antagonist by this imagery but ultimately appears as a non-hostile, short-lived character instead.

I will also highlight a detail that appears on my physical copy of the deluxe edition box but not in this image: At the bottom, dead-center, wildly white and potentially throwing off the compositional balance of the image, so that the viewer’s eye is drawn away from the darker (actually important) material higher up, is a shout-out for “Available on amazon.com” that is part of the actual, printed image, not just a sticker that can be removed. It’s a noteworthy example of something like commercialization/capitalism making the game worse in this small way. (The placement of the previously-established season pass + DLC indicator arguably likewise messes with the underlying image by throwing in extra red and by obscuring the spider monster.)

          In his video “Little Nightmares, and The Importance of the Experience,” YouTuber Joseph Anderson attempts to both define a hard-to-pin-down sort of game and also interrogate his complicated feelings about it, with the 2017 adventure horror platformer Little Nightmares at the heart of the discussion. The hard-to-pin-down sort of game is an “experience,” and within the first couple seconds of the video, Anderson uses a definition for it that sounds about right to me: “one of those games that focuses on atmosphere and making you feel something rather than introducing mechanics and then testing you on them. . . .” A less generous description via me that could be applied to horror games especially is “streamer bait” (all about big, easy screams and pogging for the sweet donos); to use some of the parlance of the times, I might also deploy the words “hype moments and aura.” Games with a strong superficial appeal that likely takes precedence over the aspects often used to evaluate the medium as a never-ceasing conveyer belt of products someone might want to buy: things like length and replayability and having complex systems to engage with.

Typically, these sorts of games can be experienced second-hand without feeling like you’re missing anything, and that feeling can be contrasted against more mechanics-focused titles. As an example of the latter, consider my experience with the Resident Evil series—My feeling has been that I can be totally spoiled on every plot point, puzzle, scare, and set piece in those games but still enjoy playing them because the mechanics of inventory management and moment-to-moment survival via combat (which interfaces with the inventory by subtracting resources like ammunition or healing items) are so engaging. Little Nightmares certainly does not have that depth, and I was heavily spoiled on it in advance without caring since I never planned to play it, yet when I finally did play Little Nightmares and its DLC levels and its 2021 sequel, I did still connect with the games as both the “experience” Anderson describes/defines and also on a mechanical level.

This is where the discussion gets awkward since I actually have a mostly-complete essay on these games that covers them in-depth, including the mechanics, but that piece isn’t out yet—It was supposed to be done this past fall (2025) before Little Nightmares 3 released and before the spiritual successor REANIMAL released near the beginning of this new(er) year, but that didn’t happen, and now I’m in the awkward position of deciding whether to heavily expand that essay to include all of the games (which I don’t want to do) or essentially steal from myself to pay myself by cannibalizing it for this smaller write-up (which I also don’t want to do). So, a small summary: I love the way Little Nightmares feels to play; I enjoy the horror imagery and accompanying themes a lot, but I found myself surprised to be comparing the series to the classic God of War games. Although radically different in their genres, I found a similarly satisfying baseline of gameplay and also an emphasis on spectacle. They’re both series about making simple block-pushing puzzles feel good to solve, and they’re also both series about a small-scale hero taking on much larger environments and enemies. There’s even some cross-over in their brutality: The heroes of Little Nightmares humiliate and sometimes kill their gigantic aggressors in ways that make the kids feel like maybe the “real” nightmare, in the end. Being able to turn the tables this way after a titanic struggle is a key part of what we might call catharsis in both series.

Take the not-at-all-unlike-God-of-War finishing sequence you perform on a spider boss monster in REANIMAL: After being chased by this wooly, human-armed thing, after dealing with its creepy ash-child offspring for an entire level (after some very minor stealthing past it in that level), you fight the beast in a boss battle and then follow it down one of its tunnels as it retreats, wounded. The spider ends up collapsed at the far end of a hallway so that you can really appreciate the approach and savor your victory, and so that you have plenty of time to question what comes next. It’s lying with its enormous, eerily featureless hole of a mouth open, directing you to enter. The two protagonists enter the mouth and disappear, but the player must continue to push forward on the left stick, as the screen distorts and as the creature twists in pain, until the event is completed and the spider barfs up both the two principal children and the friend they were trying to rescue. As I said, the way this finishing sequence is presented and the way the player is pushed to be an active participant in degrading their opponent beyond the point of just defeat is very classic God of War, and the way that you do these things (like shoot a hunter with his own gun in Little Nightmares 2) adds to the ambiguity of the horror atmosphere: You’re ostensibly a sweet-faced child, but are you perhaps an evil sweet-faced child that could grow up to be just as twisted as your adversaries given the chance?

While Tarsier Studios was unable to make their own Little Nightmares 3 in name, they were able to make REANIMAL, and any argument about not comparing the series closely is easily defeated by just looking at the two side by side briefly: Once again, you play as much smaller kids with their faces obscured traversing a twisted world that does not seem to be made for them at all; adults are over-large, inscrutable, weird, grotesque, and dangerous; the scrambling run animation, the crouch-walking stance and crouch-walking animation, and the way the two inputs can be paired to slide (the look of the slide), the minimal on-screen display with just one hit to live, the unobtrusive collectibles, which include bonus masks/hats, heavy use of fixed camera angles the player can typically just nudge a little off-center rather than truly reframe, a controversially-short playtime conducive to an “experience”-type of game—This is clearly a spiritual sequel, a with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off, a “Little Nightmares we have at home.” The purpose of this piece is not an exhaustive dissection of REANIMAL, but I want to establish a basis for comparing it with Little Nightmares in certain specific ways below (with the caveat that I have not played the official third entry yet).

Parallels? Just kidding… (The use of a boat in REANIMAL helps make it into a credible Little Nightmares 3 by further expanding the scope of the total play area. Little Nightmares 1 took place in a single facility, so, regardless of the supposed space traveled, it feels… little. The second game was able to feel longer because it covered a space that could pass more easily for large—The journey from woods to multiple locations in a city, with some more anonymous streets in between, gave the player a stronger sense of having gone a long way despite only offering a few proper levels. REANIMAL’s boat further inflates the scale, with big stretches of water separating the various levels/areas. While not quite to the point of standard action-adventure collect ‘em up gameplay, REANIMAL has a few optional secret nooks that can be reached by boat as well, between land segments, which makes it feel even richer, bigger, and longer despite the fact that it can still be completed very quickly.)

As much as REANIMAL looks like Little Nightmares and does feel like Little Nightmares, I did not like it as much as either Little Nightmares 1 or 2, and especially not more than the DLC levels for the first game, which I currently consider to be the best part of the franchise for their (in my memory) slightly more involved puzzles. I did not love REANIMAL like I wanted to, back when I was watching and re-watching and re-watching its trailers, but I did immediately start a new game after finishing it, and I want to establish that up front before saying anything else mean: I liked this little game enough to finish it in the evening and then go right back for more later in the night, since I wanted more from it. That is both compliment and condemnation…

It took me until the start of my third session with REANIMAL (where I finished it for the first time) to figure out why I wasn’t connecting with it like the previous games, and the answer was embarrassingly obvious in retrospect—The issue at the heart of the game was the design consequence of the co-op option, and an unexpected comparison that helped me to parse my own feelings was with 2009’s Resident Evil 5, which experienced a similar holistic rot for the same reason. Multiplayer is the fountainhead from which the taint flows, and all sorts of annoyances can be found downstream from it, like, say, a reduction in puzzles and an increase in vehicle segments, and also a weirdly emphatic door-opening experience. In that last case, it seems like a universal feeling in these types of games with a theoretical second human player, where doors and door-equivalents (like narrow gaps to squeeze through) frequently separate areas, and where a single-player game would have you scoot right through without issue, there always seems to be this moment of… decision on the part of Character #2 in these co-op-intentioned experiences, where your own character holds the door open or shut just a little too long or where the other character takes just a fraction of a second too long to make their way to the door, almost like you can feel the math solving for Controller #2 and finding 0 and going “Oops looks like I’m up” and then doing the thing (going through the door) as required. It takes almost no time at all, is even downright infinitesimal to the point that I doubt its existence—except for those very, very rare instances in REANIMAL where Character #2 actually got stuck on me and I had to back out of the interaction and try leaving the room again—but it is still perceptible: a however-slight enshittification of something as basic as moving from one area of the game to the next that would not exist if the thing wasn’t designed for two humans instead of one.

The many cooperative door-openings, the vehicles, and the chase sequences all serve the necessary purpose of keeping both players together and moving forward. The doors make sure no one leaves an area before the other, and the other two similarly force the pair to move forward as one while also dictating a pace that cannot be as easily accomplished with what used to be the signature elements of this franchise: stealth, platforming, and puzzle-solving. The chase sequences that I am going to emphasize both make the players move as one and prevent any inconvenient separation by more or less resetting the sequence with a “game over” if someone dawdles or does anything but progress as required. If I was to describe what my brain considers the average Little Nightmares experience, I would say something like this: The signature Little Nightmares experience is a room with a big monster in it, and the player has to navigate through that room to retrieve a key (or other key object) and then make their way back across the space and/or through another room to ultimately progress. It involves stealth, traversal, and sometimes puzzle-solving while also serving the horror by forcing players to go unseen for extended periods of time while being close to the monster, which may have a routine it follows within the space or that adapts as the player moves forward. Not every room is like this in Little Nightmares, but it’s how I instinctively remember the games (that I’ve played). By contrast, I realized that when I thought of REANIMAL, I was instead thinking about chase sequences (like Crash Bandicoot-style running toward the screen away from something big and goofy slowly rolling toward the foreground). Stealth, traversal, and puzzles feel barely present in favor of jolting set pieces that make sure players are moving forward fast, and the obvious reason why is the co-op. I embarrassingly failed to figure this out sooner because playing the game single-player looks so much like the similar paired-character gameplay of Little Nightmares 2 that I managed to forget on some level that this was a multiplayer experience.

The most numerous and most complex stealth sequences in REANIMAL fittingly occur within the first area which happens to look the most like the previous games, with a very familiar-feeling monstrous adult rather than an outright monster (an animal) as the focus. Even so, in this more nostalgic zone, I still noticed on my second playthrough that the developers followed up a chase sequence with the grabby adult by doing another chase sequence with the slithering deflated adult skins and then another chase sequence with the grabby adult now in an ice cream truck, with extremely little buffer between them. In future areas, chases take priority, and stealth seems to just involve one room of cover moving from right to left or left to right while the assigned predator red-light-green-lights from the center of the space. This is such a shame since the creature designs in this game are still stellar and satisfyingly distorted, and forcing the player to quietly, slowly contend with a pursuer that moves unhumanly could have led to some great moments in the old style—The spider could crawl on the walls or ceiling; the pelican could similarly fly around the 3D space; the underwater horse monster could have groped for you in the scarily dark and muffled depths after you crowbarred out its eyeball as the trigger for a long and intense set piece as you tried to transport the organ for reasons that seem downright arcane. Instead, you barely stealth around the spider once; the pelican is relegated to only a single chase; and the horse monster also just chases you back along a straightforward path, murdering the tantalizing prospect of an underwater segment so brutally and abruptly that it feels, conspiratorially, like cut content. Like a waste of the devs’ time and resources, even! Tellingly, the most extensive “stealth” sequence in the game is in the Resident Evil 5 mode, as you duck from cover to cover in a warzone to avoid an anonymous, boring, unseen sniper, a pattern of interaction that is expanded (arguably: continues directly) with you avoiding the blasts of a tank, which you then defeat with grenades and then also commandeer for the climactic final boss fight.

Maybe the goal was also to hype the player up and escalate the gameplay of Little Nightmares, but I still smell co-op all over these decisions. Puzzles and stealth, even with someone you like and know, slow down the experience and create problems for the camera and pacing and enemy AI that running along a linear track or driving around in an ice cream truck, boat, or tank fixes (read: avoids). Like Resident Evil 5, the game begins with some promise and then devolves: RE5 has its new version of the previous game’s now-iconic initial village stand-off/siege against an enemy horde before indulging in hours of oorah antics and then ending with the main character punching a boulder in a volcano in an anime showdown; REANIMAL starts with a series of areas that recall, at least visually, the highpoints of Little Nightmares and then ends with the kids driving a tank through a theater in a way that feels self-aware. You drive that armored sucker over the seats (and the occasional already-dead occupant) and over the stage and over the artsy-looking single chair sitting stupidly under a spotlight, and then you keep right on going out the back of the building to reach the boss fight. Ungenerously, we’ve abandoned tension and artistry for pure, adrenalizing nonsense so that co-op buddies can hoot and holler at each other with the necessary vigor without being asked to do anything too complicated or “boring.”

Trophies/achievements in games often end up tracking player progress toward easily-understood goals—reaching a certain character level, getting 3 of 3 endings, beating an optional boss, collecting all of X thingies, etc. One thing that I have come to appreciate about the Little Nightmares series is the use of the trophies to sometimes clue the player into little hidden interactions on top of the usual stuff. REANIMAL continues this trend, with some optional puzzle interactions that require poking around. This process was not as much fun for me as it was in Little Nightmares since you cannot climb, carry, and throw as many environmental objects, which narrows the possible hidden interactions in a given room quite a bit and reduces the adventure game-y-ness. Even with clearer prompts for player interaction (like highlighting collectible posters and displaying a small icon on usable switches and the like), I did still spend a lot of time fumbling around. After my first playthrough, I checked out a complete, unexpurgated list of achievement names (but not details) to give me some hints about what to look for in my second playthrough in a more comprehensive way.

It is unfortunate that the mandatory puzzle interactions feel way too simple—like, Put on the diving suits right next to the underwater elevator so you don’t drown, or Use the rifle in the same room as the hanging corpses to shoot the one that’s obviously holding a key, and also there’s conveniently multiple guns because of the co-op thing. Having the game check the player number and spawn fewer weapons if appropriate would have helped hide just a little of the unnaturalness that comes with the multiplayer emphasis. In a perfect REANIMAL world, you’d need to at least go into another room—past the tempting death elevator—and perhaps solve a little puzzle or do a little stealth to acquire the diving suits…

There is a thesis of “speed” that can be argued about REANIMAL in general, but after the chase sequences, the changes to combat probably stand out the most. In the first Little Nightmares and its DLC, fighting back was very limited and amounted to pointing either a mirror or a flashlight in the right direction to defeat enemies. In Little Nightmares 2, the focus was on very limited melee combat instead: You could pick up weapons at designated points, but since you could not jump and climb with them, they were meant to be discarded after a typically brief period of use—sometimes as a puzzle-solving solution but most noticeably as… weapons, against something like fodder enemies, but those enemies would still kill the player character in one hit, so combat was really more of a rhythm puzzle where you had to determine the spacing and timing necessary to hit the enemy during its wind-up animation. It served the horror atmosphere thanks to the high stakes and the slow speed of the weapons, but repeated failures could be obnoxious. By contrast, REANIMAL gives the two main characters weapons during the first level that they get to keep for the entire game and can use with a dedicated controller button (and will automatically stow when not in use).

(The boy receives a mighty crowbar, and the girl is assigned a dainty knife, thus affirming gender norms. Masculine Player #1 gets a long, big, curved tool, and Feminine Player #2 is stuck with a neat, little triangle. This dynamic is reversed with their light sources, as Boy has lighter and Girl lifts lamp, but this is because boys fight and don’t do laundry while girls support boys by guiding them. In conclusion: Why can’t I play as Girl? The answer may or may not be that there is a narrative subversion of their apparently-friendly dynamic coming which leaves the boy looking not so good, and the player can be implicated/made to feel something if they’ve spent the game as that character. I guess this still works in co-op since you’re actually two real people with some kind of relationship that can be put in uncomfortable parallel with the in-game action.)

These weapons that I’m talking about swing very fast, and melee combat in REANIMAL felt hectic and imprecise to me. The enemies you generally fight are seabirds and the aforementioned spider-children. With the birds, you have to wait for them to come close, but this can be hard to judge with the animals flapping around from a fixed camera perspective that usually emphasizes the scale of the setting rather than precise player positioning, so I’d typically just mash the attack button and flick the left stick toward what I thought was the closest bird and would win; with the earth-bound kids, even less strategy is necessary since you can just get in their faces right away. My impression is that death is no longer quite instant and that the characters sometimes have a moment to help each other if an enemy makes contact, I think. It’s probably less annoying than the rigid combat formula of Little Nightmares 2, but it also defangs the tension. Boat combat is somehow worse: even more empowering as you can quickly toss a limitless supply of harpoons at the occasional fat swimming adult human monster you encounter. These design decisions just do not serve the ostensible horror to me, for most of the game.

The exception to what I just said is the final area, which has the sniper and tank in it. I spoke disparagingly of it in contrast to the previous games since I was discussing the overall shortcomings of REANIMAL, but I’m now going to argue that the warzone does work well as its own thing, operating within the design priorities of this single game. First, I will acknowledge that the build-up to the level is very good. You encounter some lonely implements of war as the game progresses—some mines in the water that you have to avoid (later, explode with your handy harpoons), a large cannon that you go on a long journey to eventually power up and use to get the water horse out of your way, some distant explosions, an immobilized battleship. But you might reasonably take these things for just eerie set-dressing/lore-implying. The first really big shock and escalation of this imagery comes after the spider level when you exit the building with your newly-rescued friend to find armed adults and their military vehicles out front, where there had previously just been a lonely, misty, even post-apocalyptic vibe. It was also a shock to me since it was the most… normal-seeming adult behavior I had seen in these games. They aren’t enormously rotund and going to a restaurant to eat children, nor are they excessively long-necked and teaching living puppets—They’re (relatively) normal-looking giants behaving in sensical ways. They’re going off to war somewhere, and after a long interval, which includes firing the cannon and the disappointing underwater segment paired with the battleship, you reach the war itself within the ruins of a massive city. This, too, serves as an escalation of REANIMAL’s particular imagery and of the series’ fixation on dangerous adults harming children. The intimate, strange, grabby violence has been replaced with grown-ups manning heavy weapons or else crawling toward the protagonists with the intent to blow themselves up. Even the wounded will try to kill the children with a creepy zeal. The sides of the adults’ conflict are unclear; the smoke is thick; the atmosphere is oppressive. This is where the game’s “M” rating feels most apparent to me since you see some soldiers shoot themselves rather than attack. I get that the earlier impersonal guts imagery we see also contributes, but witnessing a present-tense self-annihilation just feels more definitive in terms of needing a harsher content warning. The speed of the game actually, finally works in tandem with the horror here since it makes you feel like you are under constant threat for the entire level, and that I found so few collectibles in this part of the game in particular on my first playthrough is a testament to just how effective the sense of strain is. It’s just one bombed-out building or trench after another, and then you’re running from more gunfire, and then here comes a crawling figure with an explosive. (The atmosphere of dread alone feels “M”-y.)

And, also, the second playable character has vomited up/birthed a monstrous sheep of vengeance that’s attacking and consuming the soldiers as well as the friends you went to so much trouble to save in the previous levels. Yes, the final tank battle with that sheep is kind of ridiculous and Resident Evil 5-core in contrast with Little Nightmares 1 and 2, but it actually does kind of possibly work within REANIMAL exclusively: After being disempowered for a while, you get a little empowerment, but your nerves are potentially still shot, and there’s a desperation to the slow forward roll of the tank as the sheep closes from behind that feels like a weirdly specific but also perfect encapsulation of the experience of this level. Thematically, the use of a sheep (or lamb) works well since the animal is usually associated with purity, innocence, and peace, but that’s inverted here. There is also a twist on the concept of a sacrificial lamb—The other kids killed the main girl as a part of some ritual before the start of the game, and the final boss is an avatar of her buried rage, which she doesn’t seem to remember but still apparently feels. There’s an element of the corruption of innocence to the imagery befitting the associated revenge/recovered memory and war concepts: the rampaging sheep that grows ever more monstrous and also the way the girl’s white dress becomes increasingly bloody during the level. Plot-wise, this is all very vague since the game has an absolute minimum of dialogue and no heavy-handed lore documents, so the player has to rely on suggestive imagery to draw their conclusions.

I’ve seen people talk online about a famine and the war and with the magic ritual as maybe a solution, and I can see some evidence for this sort of chain of causality, with adults as the cause of the children’s suffering, which would be in keeping with the thematic lineage of the first Little Nightmares. I just find myself moved much more by the children’s betrayal and the implication of violation of one kind or another: Once the sheep has consumed the final “friend” (the main playable boy), you get one brief segment of controlling the girl as she tries to flee but is then eaten herself by the creature; venturing deep inside, you find an improbable, lonely, ominous folk horror farm building where at least some part of the ritual might have been conducted and maybe where the girl was lured and bound. This is the endpoint of the journey inside the ill-defined innards of the sheep, where the tunnels open up physically but also as if for the reveal of the truth at last. At the heart of the matter (physically) is the conspiracy of the friends and the murder they committed. The reasons why don’t feel particularly meaningful to me, but the act itself and the brutal image of the lead boy dragging the bound lead girl to a well does. My first thought—with the sheep’s birth, the remote-feeling building, the conspiratorial circle of “friends” that I initially took as all male—was of something a lot nastier than a ritual to stop a war or a famine and that everything bad, including the war, could be a result of this crime. (Disclaimer for the young-feeling fandom around this game: I don’t think this is true; it was just the vibe of my first brush with the imagery.) I don’t think I’d want an entire game of just this final (war) mood, but it’s undeniably the point where REANIMAL feels most coherently and satisfyingly like its own thing, where it forced me to see it, mechanically and thematically, as its own thing rather than as a less compelling version of Little Nightmares. My sense is that it all still works as an “experience”-type game, and I may revisit it in that capacity at some point in the future; however, the balance is also off, for me: Where I can think of sections of Little Nightmares 1 (and of its DLC) and of 2 that I would like to replay for the gameplay, I cannot currently say the same thing about REANIMAL after my two completionist-minded playthroughs and around 20 hours.

“REANIMAL” is an awkward word, but I like it among video game titles for that same ungainliness and because of how it represents a portmanteau, a poetic indulgence in an often too-straightforward medium—a combination of “reanimation” (I think) and “animal.” It ends up having a couple of possible resonances with the game underneath it. On the one hand, it indicates the animal focus and a certain… twisted quality that players should expect. To me, the “re” connotes mad science, Frankensteinian resurrection and tampering, so I had a vague notion of human experimentation on the animals. At some point between pre-release and finishing the game for the first time, I thought they might be weapons that had run amok. To the best of my knowledge, however, this doesn’t seem to be explicitly confirmed, though the overly-long whale creature you find in a shattered battleship had me wondering if all the ships in the world could somehow be propelled by such whales… Still, the game has a few twisted animals that feature prominently, often as antagonists, and there is plenty of macabre imagery that surrounds them overall, so the “re” is at least vaguely represented.

Another way of seeing the title in the game is how it applies to the main girl, who has reanimated after her death. She wears a rabbit mask (an animal, obviously), and she coughs up the sheep monster as well. More animal, something like “re.” The girl’s body was thrown into a well, and the sheep is built up over the course of the game using shots of the bottom of a well, where the animal appears, grows, and mutates across multiple unsettling scenes. The well ends up being both foreshadowing of the literal well that was involved in the plot and also a suggestion of the inside of the girl (with an overwhelming red light standing in for blood and viscera). In a way, the sheep is both inside the girl, and the girl is the sheep. She was a sacrificial lamb, and so the sheep/she reanimates, logically, by coming out of her. Or the forgotten anger and pain of her death revive in this way, via the animal. Their physical relationship to one another is re-versed in the end, when the sheep swallows her in the final chapter titled “All-Consuming Past,” so it is rage-like but also like memory consuming the girl (it all comes rushing back as/like how she goes rushing down the sheep’s throat).

Of course, “re” essentially indicates a re-peat or re-do, and there is something cyclical about the game’s story, or at least in its presentation. Even if the intention is just to end in memory (all the kids presumably killed by the sheep but with the player finally enlightened), the fact that the story does still end where it began creates a sense of repetition. If “animal” is a verb—to become a revenant that births a sheep that gets revenge on your former friends and maybe finally ends the war—then to re-“animal” is to just do all that again. I wouldn’t love the idea of a true cycle, beyond the coincidental structure I’ve enjoyed highlighting, but I do prefer the thought of the kids being the heart of the story and driving the action rather than an inciting famine or war. The extensive, oceanic flooding that defines the world of REANIMAL visually at least seems to be a result of the sacrifice, since we see water beginning to pour from the well after the girl has been thrown down there, and I prefer to think that everything else comes back to the small-scale tragedy as well since it feels more poetic.