In an industry pestered by calls to “think of the children”, Tarsier’s games are useful reminders that children can be utterly depraved in ways no coddling adult would ever dream. Later in Reanimal, the developer’s latest, strictly ‘co-optional’ horror game, two kids rip an eyeball out of a massive, sunken horse skull and shove it into what I sincerely hope is the eyesocket of a slumbering whale. Somehow, this is necessary to advance.

It’s the kind of thing that would only occur to children, because children do not reason like ‘we’ do, those disgusting creeps. They sense that they exist in a world that isn’t for them: a world of baffling laws, high shelves, and everyday monstrosity; a world they’re required to ‘grow into’ by means of repeated shedding and sprouting and subjection – milk teeth and pubic hair and doing your goddamn chores. So they instinctively come up with ways to screw with the system, twist its horrible logic against itself. Why not push a horse’s eyeball into a whale?

While we’re at it, why not use a plunger to extract a discarded human skinsuit from a toilet, revealing a key that has no earthly grounds for being there? Why not wear the head of a pig you found in a closet? It’s no madder than anything else in this universe. I relish Tarsier’s tales of little nightmares surviving and vandalising the larger nightmare of existence. I’d love to see this developer’s take on Peter Pan. That said, I don’t think Reanimal is their greatest escapade. It’s a tentative departure from the dollhouse puzzling of Little Nightmares that never quite finds its own centre of gravity.

Reanimal is the story of an orphan boy and girl – the latter controlled by the computer in single player – who are searching for their friends in a cyclopean charnel daydream of bogeymen and minefields and rancid, anguished animals. Each chapter sees you rescuing one friend from some enormous, forbidding structure, rearing up at you on approach care of an elegantly scripted, semi-manual camera.

You’ll travel much of the intervening waste by motorboat, the boy steering while the girl aims her lantern from the bow. The boat gets pretty crowded, but your NPC passengers typically stay behind while you explore on foot. In general, the partner AI is solid, seldom forgetting to help out when, say, you need two pairs of hands to open a door or turn a wheel. The camera keeps track of both playable characters effectively enough that I can imagine this being a decent co-op play, though I wasn’t able to sample co-op before writing this review.

Reanimal’s world is older, shabbier, and less hopeful than that of Little Nightmares. There are fewer gleeful callbacks to the tumbling toybox of Tarsier’s old gig LittleBigPlanet. The proportions and atmosphere are closer to Playdead’s Inside, all cracked fog and vaporous stone. The architecture is more naturalistic, less of a witch’s cottage, more appropriate to your size. But you are still a child, which puts certain objects and surfaces beyond reach, while conferring a degree of passive protection against larger creatures who can’t chase you into the crevices. This is still a world in which you hide without intending to, and such ‘adults’ as you encounter react to you with hysterical outrage. You are a spider peeking out from between their toes. You are a moving dust mote in a setting that inclines toward paralysis.

The kids themselves are leaner and harder, more direct and less poetic of method, happy to wrap a marauding seagull around a crowbar, shiv a calcified mutant child, or smash the fingers of a ghoul. There’s a dedicated attack button, and later on, various ‘special weapons’. You will throw spears from the motorboat, rotate and fire a ponderous coastal turret, shoot a bazooka, hurl a grenade, and even drive a tank.

This isn’t any kind of combat system, mind. The flashes of Resident Evil are infrequent, with the game mostly driven by stealth, platforming, and gentle lock-and-key puzzles. With the exception of the tank – a cathartic endgame rush – the weapons feel like disposable puzzle props. There ain’t any ‘gunfeel’ to write home about, either. The turret has to be electrified and activated, after gaining access to another structure. It takes two of you to heft that bazooka, and you only get one shot.

I do think Tarsier have lost their way by flirting with combat, mostly because it accompanies some repetition. Harpooning explosive mutants from your boat is irritating busywork, a process of nosing forward and waiting for the lock-on icon to appear. But the presence of firearms is justified inasmuch as Reanimal is more wartime phantasm than grim fairytale.

The war element sneaks up on you, admittedly. Across the first two thirds of its seven hour runtime, the game digs into a familiar vein of industrial decrepitude, cowled in negative space that is fitfully pierced by searchlights, winking red buoys, and those ever-so-delicate patches of brighter ground that indicate a path through wreckage. There is a mill made up of pipes and locker rooms housing computer monitors that drizzle lines of red and white code. There are carparks doused in volcanic ash. There is an orphanage of clapboard and chains and underground streets, entered by clambering through the face of a clock.

The settings are dingy projections, channelling primal fears and slowly revealing something about your fey handful of orphans. The same is true of the creatures. The first major antagonist is a lanky, lumpen abductor who spends half his time peering under tables, the other half engrossed in putrid domestic routines, gathering and ironing suits of human skin. You look at him and you fear becoming him. It’s best to keep an eye on the skinsuits, as well: some flop down from branches to chase you through the long grass.

Later, you face a many-elbowed abomination with a pitch-black maw that recalls the watering well shown during the game’s opening. These visual reciprocities are load-bearing pillars. While there’s the suggestion of a world map here, with a critical path that loops between locations, Reanimal isn’t a consistent work of geography but a spiral of symbols. In particular, animal symbols. The game explores the figure of the animal as both a thing to slaughter and a thing to sacrifice, with the predictable implication that you are next on the chopping block – an anxiety you can poke at, by having your kids wear pig head hats.

The visual composition is exquisite throughout, each piece of architecture carefully framed to foreground exits and puzzle pieces, without recourse to overt yellow-paint condescension or some kind of magic highlighting vision. That said, I do feel that Tarsier’s designers need to break out of their groove. Reanimal’s landscape fits together with a smoothness that feels too practised, bordering on enervating. The segmentation of scenes and the foreshadowing can be rather by-the-numbers. For example, a monster happening to leave the room just as you enter, not quite seeing you, a few scenes before the moment when you finally have to confront or escape it.

And then the shells start to fall. Over the last third, Reanimal sheds its Silent Hillian pallor and veers a bit randomly into World War parody, with areas made up of trenches, stripped trees, and Futurist gutted cityscapes. In some ways these closing chapters are the heart of the game. Reanimal’s zoological body horror appears to take heavy inspiration from the agony of animals during the World Wars – beasts of burden splintered and thrashing in the mud, lashed to artillery cannons or caught on the wire, entangled and transformed into vengeful, howling machines.

Assuming I’m diagnosing the inspirations correctly, I think the animal metaphors here work well. That sheep from the trailer is a hell of a thing. I’m less sold on the invocation of the World Wars in general. The game doesn’t do anything very imaginative or probing with that colossal archive of pain and atrocity; it kind of just throws more bodies on the pile. It also leads to a closing act that, at worst, feels like a mopey Medal of Honor, in which you dart between shadows to avoid snipers, and navigate bunkers while being hounded by crawling grenadiers.

The Little Nightmares series continues in the hands of Supermassive. Nic (RPS in peace) called their Little Nightmares 3 “a heartbreakingly competent cover act of the series previous entries” with “a few truly brilliant moments, but a comparative dearth of imagination.” Not having played LN3, I get the sense that Reanimal is the more impressive game, inasmuch as it’s clearly trying to shatter the mold, but for every ghastly surprise there’s a moment of either aimlessness or overfamiliarity. It’s a game tottering through the mist of No Man’s Land with an armload of flapping skins and a porcine helmet, not quite sure of its destination.

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Here’s one I wasn’t quite expecting: Silent Hill 2 remake and Cronos: The New Dawn developers Bloober Team are working on a Star Trek game in collaboration with license owners Paramount. As you might imagine, given Bloober’s pedigree, it doesn’t appear to be a very uplifting Star Trek game. It is not a Star Trek game in which you would expect to have an Earl Grey teaparty on the Holodeck, with Data playing the viola. Called Star Trek: Shadow Frontier, it’s a “psychological thriller” set on an uncharted planet that has become a spaceship graveyard. Something with tendrils lurks hereabouts, and it’s trying to eat your mind.

In Shadow Frontier, you play no less than Ro Laren, a Bajoran Federation officer (and later, Maquis turncoat) introduced by Star Trek: The Next Generation back in the 90s, with original actress Michelle Forbes supplying voice and motion capture. She’s come to the planet to answer a distress call, which is never a great opening move. “As she explores the planet’s corrupted surface and crosses paths with other survivors, she must face twisted creatures, a hostile ecosystem, and an entity that seeks to envelop her body and mind,” explains the press release. The aesthetics slop Zdzisław Beksiński-flavoured effluence over what could be Romulan or perhaps Klingon interiors. Yeah, we’re a long way from the campy fixtures of the original Star Trek series. Here’s a trailer.

Bloober are making Shadow Frontier in partnership with Paramount Games Studio – a new “unified” development operation that encompasses Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media, announced amid layoff-ridden restructuring as Paramount complete their $82 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery. In a statement, PGS head of creative and production Shawn Kittelsen enthuses that “we have full confidence in Bloober’s ability to deliver a game that does justice to the Star Trek name while bringing something bold and new to the beloved franchise”.

Bloober CEO Piotr Babieno is similarly flush with ecstasy for things both bold and beloved. “As lifelong fans of science fiction, Star Trek has always held a special place in our hearts,” he says in the release. “By combining that passion with what we do best, horror, we’ve partnered with Paramount to create something truly unique: a new adventure set in a beloved universe, enriched with our own signature layer of dark, psychological thriller. We’re genuinely excited about this journey, and our hope is to honor the legacy of Star Trek in a way that feels both respectful yet refreshingly different.”

As a recovering Trekker, it’s been years since I thought about Ro Laren, but off the top of my head, her backstory would suit a “dark, psychological thriller”. She’s a convict, defector, secret agent – an absolute piece of work, basically. The Bajorans at large are Star Trek’s one-size-fits-all analogy for displaced and traumatised peoples throughout history. Bloober have never been particularly subtle in how they depict trauma, and I confess, I can imagine their attempts to plumb Star Trek’s subconsciousness going very badly. I am, however, intrigued by the pitch in general.

It’s out in 2027, and you can read more on Steam. Curious about the ins and outs of adapting Star Trek? You might want to peruse this interview with the founder of Zachtronics about their abandoned pitch for a Next Generation engineering sim.

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Bloober Team, the Polish horror game specialist behind titles like Cronos: New Dawn, has this week announced Star Trek: Shadow Frontier in partnership with Paramount Games. It will be “Coming Soon” to the Switch 2 and multiple other platforms.

The game is described as a psychological story-driven action-adventure set in third-person, where players take on the role of Ro Laren, who must survive a breathtaking but lethal environment located in the expansive Star Trek universe. Here’s some information via the Steam listing:

“After crashing onto a distant planet overtaken by a strange consciousness, Ro Laren must survive in an environment that is as breathtaking as it is lethal. In true Star Trek fashion, Ro’s mission is driven by duty and purpose. But here, discovery comes at a terrible cost. The more she uncovers, the deeper she is pulled into a corrupted labyrinth where her memories twist and the planet threatens to sever her connection to reality. Only by solving the mysteries of this strange world can Ro hope to make peace with the demons of her past, boldly going into the heart of darkness like never before.”

Throughout her story, she’ll have to deal with dangerous creatures and surroundings, and choose whether or not to engage in combat or outmaneuver the enemy. The hostile ecosystem also poses a “constant threat”, as it attempts to absorb Ro’s consciousness, “burrowing deep in her mind and plaguing her with haunting visions”.

Bloober also promises to offer a good blend of “exploration, puzzles, combat and cinematic set-pieces” wrapped up in a “gripping” story adventure that rewards “patience, observation and smart decision-making”. According to the content description, you can also expect “intense violence, blood and gore against aliens”.

If this wasn’t enough for one day, Bloober Team has also announced Cronos: Lazarus DLC will be arriving in “Fall 2026“.

“Return to the wastelands of New Dawn as the once-loyal Pathfinder in the process of transforming into the Warden you know and love from the base game. Isolated in the Terminal and severed from the Collective, he devotes every waking moment to awakening a lost Essence he refuses to let fade. Uncover fragments of Warden’s past, teleport, strike, and outrun a relentless hunter.”

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Horror can come from all sorts of inspirations. Whether cultural anxieties or forgotten legends, there is often a clear connection with specific times and places and this is especially the case for Subversive Memories. Prior to playing I was not particularly aware of the Brazilian dictatorship that oppressed the population between 1964 and 1985, but reading up on it afterwards makes it apparent that the generational trauma inflicted here has left a lasting impression on the country. Rather than a strictly historical story, Subversive Memories adds a supernatural aspect to emphasise the depths of the damage being done.

Aesthetically, Subversive Memories takes a lo-fi PS1 style approach that is very reminiscent of the excellent Signalis. Where that title went for a futuristic science fiction look, the low poly graphics give everything here a drab and utilitarian feel – perfect for the mood and period. Your torch is an essential piece of equipment and the lighting effects are excellent, showcasing the details in the environment. I really got the sense that I was exploring a mid-20th century base with analogue phones and typewriters helping to set the scene.

You play as Renata, a Brazilian investigator in period appropriate flared jeans. Haunted by gaps in her memory and a sense of being lost she follows a lead to an abandoned military base. What at first seems like a routine, if horrific, tale of oppression soon turns into a nightmare beyond her wildest fears. In gameplay terms this takes the form of a classic survival horror, with limited inventory slots, scarce resources, and a focused map filled with shortcuts and secret passages.

Unlike many games in this genre there are no weapons to wield here. Instead, your torch doubles up as a ranged attack with a focused beam doing damage to the shadowy entities that lurk around the base. This is heavily inspired by Alan Wake, of course, but actually fits the narrative and setting even better here. Batteries are used up by flashes and are in short supply. I actually ran out a couple of times and had to reload an earlier save to plan my attacks more strategically and to avoid more enemies.

The base is not a huge location and the game is very much a small and focused experience. This means that you quickly get to grips with the layout and can focus on the most efficient and safest route between puzzles and interactive objects. There are many notes and files to read which are all stored in your safe rooms to go over later. This twist on the usual format could have been annoying if the game world were bigger, but it can also be remedied by taking notes or taking screenshots to refer back to.

The puzzles are logical and depend on you keeping careful track of the information you find, as well as taking objects from one place to another. There is a good mix of the two as well, with the former always feeling clear and understandable – aside from one optional padlock that I haven’t yet found the solution to. Combat is also intuitive but enemies hit hard and healing items are in very short supply, so it is definitely a good idea to save regularly.

One of the real highlights of any traditional survival horror is the feeling of the save rooms and Subversive Memories absolutely nails this. The calming music is perfectly judged and wouldn’t be out of place in any Resident Evil title. Your files can be read in the save rooms, but there isn’t an inventory box to juggle items – the latter not really being needed as the loadout is much more streamlined than in many other games of this genre.

The most important aspect of the game, however, is the power of the narrative and setting. While the presentation isn’t a huge departure from the likes of the Umbrella Corporation, the fact that this is based on real stories of torture and murder make this a far more significant and historically important game. The files and notes you come across contain redacted accounts of some truly abhorrent actions, many of which are unfortunately still relevant to oppressive regimes today.

Another key feature of the storyline is the uncanny ability for Renata to exorcise the ghosts of victims and enter a vision of their pasts. This requires you to find hidden candles, some of which are locked behind the most complex puzzles in the game, with each memory telling a particular story of abuse and corruption. Whether you’re familiar with the history or not these are heartbreaking moments and are a testament to the trauma that has inspired the game.

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When I think of Idols of Ash, I think of seven sounds, listed here in order of deepening dreadfulness. The first and nicest sound is the clink of my silvery grapple sinking its hook, interrupting the rush of air past my ears as I fall. That’s the second, less nice sound. The third sound is a distant, tectonic groaning, disconsolate and wakeful: it could be the wind again, pushing through some unaccountably musical lungful of stone. Yeah, I’m sure that’s all it is.

The fourth sound is definitely not the wind: a squeaky, squidgy rumination, like the cooing of idle pigeons. You hear that cooing and you start running, because it generally precedes the fifth sound, the stiletto rattle of chitinous feet. When the legs are close, there’s the sixth sound, a rasping, gaping hiss, and it’s time to yeet yourself into the chasm while hurling your grapple towards the nearest jutting surface. With any luck, you will not then hear the seventh sound: the thud of your hook bouncing off the rock.

Idols of Ash casts you as a bereaved spelunker who is trying to reach the bottom of a sunken, sandy megastructure, while avoiding the attentions of an unpredictably spawning giant centipede. You may have already encountered the centipede on social media. It’s catnip for the reaction-farmers, a segmented, scurrying hellbeast that rivets the eye and frenzies the bladder. You spy that thing zig-zagging around a cavern roof and all thought of route-planning evaporates, as you resort to the ultimate sprint button: gravity. Your character’s health bar can handle the odd nip or plummet, but you have no means of defending yourself.

Still, the centipede is just the supporting act. By dint of how it hurries you along and also, how ingeniously it navigates the contours – tick tick tick – the Creature sharpens your appreciation for the megastructure itself: a kilometre’s depth of hanging archways, inverted towers, vertical pipes with carefully spaced protrusions, sloping slabs, and ashen kilns ringed by spectral vegetation. Marked from afar by gouts of green light, the kilns are both waypoints and checkpoints. Breathe in the ash and it will “remember you”, teasing out a few sentences of your character’s past.

The world is a cancellous abstraction, like something out of NaissancE, but also a convincingly built and deteriorating place, where unrecognisable planes gather into what could almost be streets. I wonder how much of this ambient indecision is inherent to any catacomb or mausoleum, architectures built to accommodate, or entrap entities that no longer need any earthly dwelling. I’m similarly uncertain about the little limbless statues you find, huddled around hovering flames that restore your health. The statues look humanoid when upright, but they’re worryingly grublike when teetered over. Perhaps they are really the Creature’s eggs. Perhaps this isn’t a tomb, but simply a nest, with human vestiges grown to lure the unwary wanderer seeking catharsis underground.

The story is told by way of those kiln memories and a couple of cutscenes. It’s a brief tale of loss and despair – the first run takes maybe an hour, and you could fit all the text on one page – with a slightly cumbersome exposition dump at the end. I otherwise admire the writing’s sparseness and pungency, the repeated line about the ash “remembering you” being a wonderfully predatory framing that reminds me of the Shalebridge Cradle. Still, I think I’d have preferred Idols of Ash to be devoid of even these sparing bits of backstory. The larval stalagmites and ash piles don’t need any ‘grounding’. Coleridge’s much-abused exhortation to suspend disbelief takes on new resonance when you’re dangling from a rope with a nightmare arthropod at the other end.

Complete the game, and you’ll belatedly realise that Idols of Ash is designed for speedrunners. The grappling physics are both intuitive and rewarding to experiment with. You start by learning the length of the rope, indicated on the HUD, and mastering the speed and trajectory of the hook’s flight. Sometimes, the distance between ledges is exactly the length of the rope, but the gaps increase as you descend, and some of the ‘routes’ prove to be dead ends – extremely unpleasant, when the Creature is close behind. Then you learn to use the hook while falling. You also learn to use it on the flat, leaping and grappling for a speed boost. With practice, you can be a passable Spider-Man, swooping from arch to arch. Except that Spider-Man is not a fun parallel, here. Tick tick tick.

There’s a harder mode to unlock, in which the Creature is more aggressive and tenacious. Better yet, there are a couple more maps. Best of all, there are inverted maps that invest the terrain you insolently tumbled through with new deviousness. If you survive these and are up for more, the logical next port of call is the rather more technical White Knuckle. Or if you don’t want to feel all spooked and depressed while spelunking, why not take a swing at lovely freebie Grimhook.

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Ailurophobia is the fear of cats, and while having a deep-rooted anxiety for felines would certainly make your playthrough of Meowmories that much more terrifying, perhaps megalophobia (the fear of big things) would be a more appropriate theme for this cat-based horror game, where you play as a cat and must brave the comparatively huge environment around you in search of your owner.

Carried only by the happy memories in your psyche, the player will traverse a nightmarish world, while avoiding the creeps, monsters, and horrifying details tucked around every corner.

Not to worry, though; the cat’s meow (powered by the player’s actual voice) has the power to freeze enemies in their tracks.

Meowmories has no release date, but a demo is scheduled for release soon on PC (via Steam).

Here are some more details on the game’s features from the developer.

“Meowmories” is a horror adventure game built in Unreal Engine 5, where you explore an eerie nightmare world from a “cat’s perspective” in search of your separated owner.

Awakening in an unfamiliar world, your only guide is the “fragments of happy memories” left behind by your owner. Survive the terrifying “Meowmare” where grotesque monsters roam, and return to your beloved owner. Beyond the fear and sorrow, a heartwarming ending awaits.

A Story Just for You and Your Cat

Before starting the game, you can freely name the “Owner” and the “Cat.” This is a story of a bond beyond words, woven by no one else but you and your precious cat.

◆ Overcome the Nightmare through Trial & Error

In the nightmare world, you will be caught by monsters time and time again, forcing you to try again. However, learning enemy patterns through trial and error and finding a way out using narrow gaps and high places provides an exceptional sense of achievement.

Memory Collection and Multiple Endings

Finding the “mementos” scattered throughout this nightmare world will alter the ending. The estimated playtime is about 1 to 2 hours. Within this compact timeframe, highly replayable elements and deep emotions are densely packed.

◆ Scan Ability

A high-risk, high-return exploration skill that allows you to pinpoint the locations of enemies and items, but at the cost of revealing your own position to the monsters. To survive the nightmare world, your strategic choice of “where to use it” will be put to the test.

Your Voice Becomes Power (Microphone Support)

By literally “meowing” into your microphone in real life, you can temporarily halt the movements of the approaching nightmares. Your own voice as the owner can interfere with the cat’s world.

(*Rest assured, if you do not have a microphone, you can fully play and complete the game using only button controls.)

◆ To All Cat Lovers:

This game involves gameplay where the cat is attacked by terrifying monsters and includes animations of the cat being swatted down.

However, there are no cruel depictions, such as blood or painful cries. “Falling down” is simply a signal to retry the nightmare, and the cat will stand up again and again to keep moving toward its owner. Cat lovers can play this game with peace of mind.

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