A warped world awaits in Tarsier Studios’ latest horror. At least this time you can bring a friend

BY JULIAN BENSON

Game Reanimal Developer Tarsier Studios Publisher THQ Nordic Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release TBA

“Part of the reason we went with the shared camera is to create beautiful scenery,” Talajic says. “Splitting a screen will never look pretty enough for our taste”

You journey through Reanimal’s islands in small boats, searching for your five missing friends. This is no The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker, though; it’s a one-way trip

We make a strange pair. Two children sit in a small dinghy bobbing in the dark water, the boat’s outboard motor quiet. The girl wears a white shift and a simple rabbit mask a lot like you would see at a children’s party themed around Alice In Wonderland. More macabrely, a hessian sack covers the boy’s head, the thick cord of a cut hangman’s noose trailing down his back. The lamp hanging from a thin pole at the stern does little to fend off the encroaching gloom. We push forward on the thumbstick and the outboard motor chokes into life, driving the little boat toward a distant beach.

Tarsier Studios is taking a risk. The Malmö-based developer behind games such as Little Nightmares and its sequel doesn’t like to demo unfinished work, but today it’s showing us an incomplete section of the forthcoming Reanimal. The game will stutter as assets are loaded in, items will turn invisible in our hands, and incomplete animations mean skinned corpses that should chase us like writhing snakes will simply glide icily over the floor. We can sense the hesitance in the room. This is a studio that values quality and strives for perfection. It’s why it’s sometimes called “chaotic”, according to creative director Dennis Talajic. Even late into a game’s development, the team will tweak and change, cut and alter, iterate and improve. They end up with better games as a consequence, but it’s an approach that demands faith that the game will realise its potential, and it takes a toll on the entire studio. At least, that used to be the case. Today, Tarsier Studios is showing off unfinished work because it is a changed company. After what it took to complete its previous game, it has to be.

“Little Nightmares 2 was a challenging project,” CEO Oliver Merlöv says. That’s an understatement. During that game’s production, the team had to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak and a move to remote work. Before the studio was acquired by Embracer Group, when it was still independent and working with publisher Bandai Namco, Tarsier was also under enormous financial strain. “Everyone was trying to find ways for the studio to survive long enough to reach the next milestone,” co-founder Andreas Johnsson says. The pressure, he continues, “meant [people made] stupid decisions that put us into a worse situation.”

WE PUSH FORWARD ON THE THUMBSTICK AND THE OUTBOARD MOTOR CHOKES ON LIFE, DRIVING THE LITTLE BOAT TOWARD A DISTANT BEACH

By the final months of production, it was clear that one of those unwise decisions was not to produce a feature-complete alpha of Little Nightmares 2 before moving forward with production. “I was surprised by the amount of tech debt,” says Merlöv, who joined Tarsier as COO in Little Nightmares 2’s final months. “Because there wasn’t a proper alpha, many things were added very late.

“We are a bit chaotic as a studio,” Talajic says. “We test, and we iterate. That’s a lot of our process. We feel out as we play the game and work a lot on making every room, every scene, interesting.” The problem with working with such flexibility is that it can leave a lot of mess behind. Every time something was added, it produced new bugs, and because the team was focused on building out the game’s content, the earlier ones weren’t getting dealt with. “We had falling-through-the-world bugs, which you shouldn’t have at that stage,” Merlöv says. “The debt just kept on building. It’s not that [the team] made bad calls – I probably would have done the same thing – it’s just that the circumstances put them in a tricky spot.”