Reanimal review – you will never turn your back on a pelican again as long as you live

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Switch 2; Tarsier Studios
Childhood terrors come to wretched life in a grim fairytale of a puzzle-platformer that’s as beautifully macabre as it is hard to put down

The orphaned child protagonists of this horror puzzle-platformer have truly been through a lot. Exploring a twisted version of their home town in a rowboat, they must brave dark waves as they search for lost friends, either hiding or fleeing, heart in mouth, from malformed entities with rabid enthusiasm for eating kids. As the children struggle with their outsize fears, so will you. Still, this is a co-operative game, so at least you’ll be sharing the horrors with someone sitting next to you.

In the early 2000s, irreverent gaming blog Old Man Murray pioneered the “crate review system”. The rubric was simple: the sooner the player encountered their first wooden cube of heinous mediocrity, the more uninspired the game. Updating this method for 2026, we’ve got a few new contenders: how soon before you shimmy slowly through a gap, boost a companion over a high ledge so they can pull you up or tediously rotate some mechanism with the analogue stick? Reanimal pulls out all these hits within the first 20 minutes and, by the time the credits roll, six hours in, it feels as if developer Tarsier has wrung the final drops of interactive novelty from its formula of light exploration puzzles, tense but simple stealth and ghastly chases. And yet this grim fairytale is still difficult to put down.