I've played Little Nightmares 1 and 2, along with similar kinds of games like INSIDE, so I knew the kind of experience to expect with REANIMAL. I cannot recommend this title at all. Is it gorgeous? Yes. Does really cool stuff happen? Yes. Does it freak me out a little bit? Yes. Is it fun with a friend? Yes.
HOWEVER.
This game feels rushed and unfinished on a foundational level and all of the issues I have with it are heavily compounded by incredibly long load times every time you die (around a 1:30 on average to 10 minutes at the longest, I timed it with the clock app on my phone this isn't an exaggeration) which quickly makes even the smallest issue start to feel really big. Couple this with frequent bugs and incredible network lag issues (despite both players having fantastic internet connections) that can make the game almost unplayable, any kind of oversights make for a frustrating experience.
The game has a nasty habit of dropping you into a dangerous situation, without being a "safe" area, long enough for you to figure out what you need to do before you die. That means waiting another 2 minutes before you can try again to figure out what you're supposed to do.
Having an unclear path or objective under threat is a frequent issue, and in other games this is handled really well with either a very simple situation that feels more dangerous than it is, or the mechanics required for the dangerous situation having already been well taught before hand. If the price for failing wasn't such a steep waste of my time staring at a black screen most of these would be minor issues, but they happen so often it makes the game feel incredibly ill conceived and poorly thought through.
Some of these mechanics feel poorly thought out or poorly utilized as well. For example there is a rope mechanic. It works really well for the slow areas where you can take your time and figure out how it works, but it is abysmal in a situation where both players have to run away from something, especially with lag throwing our player positions all over the place.
The game also frequently has issues with showing the player what is going on, and I mean that in a literal sense, like actually being able to witness what is happening to you. There is a grenade hallway you have to run down, the camera is pulled back really far from the player, meaning the explosions that you've run past stay on the screen for a long time after you've already cleared them as an obstacle. The explosions are so large and on the screen for so long that they block the view down the hallway completely, leaving you unable to know where you are in relation to the other grenades leading to deaths that weren't your fault and waiting another 2 minutes to try again.
This happens in many other ways, such as the players frequently getting lost in the dark surroundings of the environments, which can be mitigated with your light, but my friend and I would frequently get each other mixed up and end up accidentally killing ourselves and waiting another 2 minutes to try again. The characters just aren't different enough to tell who is who when a super stressful scary surprise is happening and you're trying to figure out where you are even supposed to go.
The controls feel the worst out of any of the games in this kind of genre. Frequent issue of getting caught on a pebble or the character not moving where you want it to go. The movement seems to always be approximating your inputs instead of actually just being responsive and it feels terrible, especially compared to other games in the genre. The levels have collision boxes far too complicated for this kind of control scheme and we have died many times because the characters decided to get caught on what we perceived as a clear path but the collisions decided was a wall or a pit or whatever.
I've got 8 hours of this game at the time of this review and I have not completed it yet. We have reached a point that feels really close to the end of the game and we have encountered a game breaking bug that just keeps happening no matter what we do. The game refuses to load the next part of the game, so now we can't even finish this $40 game that I have spent half the time playing sitting on a loading screen.
I feel like if the bugs, and lag issues (please patch with rollback netcode I'm begging you) and ESPECIALLY the load times were addressed, I feel like I could recommend it to someone who really really liked this genre despite the poor level design and jank. But as it stands right now its borderline unplayable in co-op.
