From the very first minute, Reanimal creates a sense of unease and uncertainty, gradually immersing the player in a dark and symbolic world. Behind the seemingly simple plot lies a profound story filled with metaphors, allusions, and subtleties. This is why the game’s ending raises so many questions and debates: what really happened, and how should the events be interpreted? Let’s find out!
Reanimal’s Plot
Five children stare into a well: the world around them is destroyed, animals and people transformed into terrifying monsters. It feels as if the battlefield has been hit by some supernatural explosion. The children look strange and hide their faces. They have no names, only nicknames. Boy. Girl. Hood. Bucket. Bandage. The boy wears a bag over his head, tied tightly, with a noose around his neck. Why wear it? Shame? Guilt? A reminder of something?
In the opening scene, a boy wakes up alone in a tiny boat in the middle of the water. There’s nothing around except a buoy in the distance. Its light becomes a recurring signal; each time it appears, something terrible follows. The boy swims between the buoys along narrow rocks strewn with floating mines. People once lived here. The abandoned factory confirms this: offices with desks and keyboards, luggage scattered about, as if everyone fled in panic. A disaster has struck.
Along the way, he finds a girl floating face down, surrounded by seagulls. When she wakes up, she immediately attacks him. She must have been through something. They both were.
The duo then travels through several locations in the ghetto, finding a third character and escaping from the first monster, named The Sniffer. It’s a flexible, elastic, and terrifying monster. Its face appears melted, and its joints are boneless. It can crawl inside corpses and wears human skin like clothing, washing and ironing it. The freak fills its cages with adult victims, who wait in line to bid farewell to life.
The Sniffer is particularly disturbing in his attempts to imitate human behavior. He offers a child ice cream from a van and then snatches it. He wears costumes and is poor at imitating normal movements. He seems to remember his former self. The children escape by stealing the ice cream van.
The world is getting worse. The flooded city is full of living corpses called Swimmers. Water mines are scattered everywhere. Artillery positions are empty. Defensive wooden walls have collapsed into the sea. This was a real war. People fought back against something supernatural – and lost.
In one of the houses, the group finds a dead man in a chair, laced with harpoons. A boy carefully takes the weapon from his lap. This tiny gesture is a tribute to the fallen soldier.
A fourth character appears at the hotel—a bandaged one. He’s grabbed by a huge, mutated pelican. The children pursue him to a lighthouse and a barn, where they find live pigs—the only innocent, non-aggressive animals in the game. The kids rescue their friend, lure the pelican there, and set the barn on fire. This was necessary—there was no other way.
The children arrive at a bus stop. The girl asks if anyone knows why they’re even there. Suddenly, she clutches her face—a dead sheep, writhing in a well, flashes across the frame. Something is clearly connected to it. Something inside the little girl is trying to escape. The vision ends.
The next location is a boarding school, where faceless children made of dust wander the corridors. They lower pigs on ropes into a pit, and then a child with a bucket, to feed something below. This huge, spider-like creature with a touch of human hands is called Mother. You defeat her with spears and climb into her mouth to retrieve the child and the bucket.
Then military trucks appear. Are the soldiers evacuating the children, or are the children running away? It’s unclear. The scene seems, for a moment, like a tiny glimmer of hope in a bleak world. Then the Girl coughs again. More red flashes. Sheep. The truck crashes into a collapsed tunnel. The children swerve through the sewers and find themselves back at the dam. They fire artillery at a huge underwater creature blocking their path.
There are wrecked warships nearby. Inside one of them, they find a giant, mutated whale, which doesn’t attack. They dive underwater, retrieve the sea monster’s eye, and give it to the whale. The whale steps aside. The moment feels mythical, in the spirit of Lovecraft.
At the end, the Girl coughs up a whole sheep! She runs away while the others watch in horror. The sheep grows and hunts the children. First, it devours a child with a bucket, then a child with bandages. After each meal, it grows in size, sprouting human limbs.
A deranged sniper in the clock tower is shooting at the heroes. A dying soldier plays the piano, trying to console himself before his death. Soldiers blow themselves up in the trenches. The wounded retreat through those same trenches. A tank fires indiscriminately until children capture it and smash through the walls. It’s both absurd and tragic.
The final scene seems straight out of the Bible or Greek mythology. The children fire tank shells at a sheep. It explodes, but suddenly engulfs the Boy, becoming the size of a building. Then it devours the Girl as well.
Inside the monster, the girl experiences memories. Four boys perform a bloody ritual: they drip their blood and kill her white rabbit (it can be seen in one of the five coffins scattered throughout the game). In the memory, she finds the dead rabbit in the hut and is disheartened. An occult seal is on the floor. Darkness surrounds her. She grabs a knife. And then—silence.
In the next shot, four boys stuff her into a sack, drag her to a well, and throw her in. Sheep-like figures gather around. The well overflows. Tar-like creatures in white masks cautiously approach the girl’s body. They look like her. They don’t attack. They mourn. They look like the other sacrificed children. Now we know that other children were thrown there too. Or are they there because the sheep took them?
As the well overflows in the post-credits scene, the player is left with questions. Did throwing the girl into the well start the apocalypse? Or was it done to prevent it? Is this a purgatory born of a bad deal? Did the children unleash a demon out of desperation, stupidity, and curiosity?
Nothing is known for certain yet, but that’s the point! Reanimal is a story for reflection. It’s brutal, symbolic, and intentionally ambiguous. It mixes war trauma and occult rituals, images of sacrifice and physical horror. The game forces you to delve into the fragments of memory in search of meaning. The story isn’t over yet—the developers have three expansions planned, so one day we’ll learn the truth.
Lor Reanimal
Four young men performed a bloody ritual—likely out of despair over the protracted war. Perhaps they simply wanted to restore peace. The boys chose a girl as a sacrificial lamb: they killed the heroine’s beloved rabbit to break her spirit. Then they sacrificed her to the one who dwells in the well.
The red light signals the presence of a demon. The sheep is a vessel for something ancient and dark. It grows as it devours each new child—perhaps feeding on their guilt.
The game’s atmosphere works because the characters are constantly running. There are huge monsters, loud noises, unimaginable scale. But there’s also a deeper fear. The feeling that nothing you do will actually fix anything.
From a psychological perspective, Reanimal speaks volumes about the process of repressing a traumatic memory. But repression doesn’t heal the trauma; it only buries the fear deeper until it grows and erupts.
The children in Reanimal rarely show vulnerability. They load tanks, kill monsters, but rarely cry. Except for the occasional caress of a doomed pig and a girl’s tears over a rabbit, there’s almost no tenderness in the characters. Psychological trauma paralyzes people. War steals childhood. Perhaps that’s why they wear masks.
How many endings are there in Reanimal?
Reanimal is perceived as a spiritual successor to Little Nightmares thanks to its enigmatic plot, leaving much room for interpretation. This time, the story is much darker—though Reanimal only has two endings. The first is visible to all players, the second only to those who open five secret coffins throughout the game.
● Normal ending – “Sacrifice”.
● True Ending – “The Invisible Big Picture”
Reanimation’s ending explained
The main characters are an orphaned brother and sister who are trying to find friends in a country devastated by war. To understand the game Reanimal, there are four key points to consider:
● At the beginning of the game, the main characters and their friends peer into a well. This was already a hint at preparations for the upcoming black ritual.
● In one of the flashbacks, the player sees a group of boys performing a ritual in a barn: dripping their blood into a bowl shaped like a lamb’s head.
● The boys then chose their main victim—a girl. To lure her in and weaken her, the boys secretly kill her rabbit. The girl finds her beloved pet dead in the barn shortly afterward, after which she is attacked.
● The boys kill the girl with her own knife, then drag her body to a well and throw her down.
Why did they need this? There’s no definitive explanation, but the most popular theory is that the children grew tired of the endless war in their country and decided to end it with the help of dark forces. The girl became a “sacrificial lamb” for a certain demon. When the girl’s body falls into the well, it overflows with a dark substance. The demon stopped the war, but, as is typical of dark deities, he did it in his own way – turning the country (or the entire world?) into a kind of hell. People became the living dead, and animals mutated into monsters.
Here are some more facts about the “sacrificial” theory:
● In the opening scenes, the brother pulls his sister out of the water – she immediately attacks him. We see a flash of the heroine’s memory of who exactly killed her.
● Throughout the game, the girl appears to be an ordinary character, but in fact, the demon lurks within her dead body. In some scenes, the shape of a lamb is visible in her silhouette.
How to get the secret ending in Reanimal
As you progress, find five coffins to unlock Reanimal’s secret ending. All of them are located slightly off-center from the main storyline, requiring careful exploration of all nine chapters of the game.
Important: To unlock Reanimal’s secret ending, you need to find all five coffins in one playthrough. Otherwise, you’ll receive a helpful hint on where to find the coffins in your next playthrough. Below are the locations of all the hidden coffins in Reanimal.
Coffin #1 – Chapter 1: Dead in the Water
In the first chapter, you’ll ride a minecart across a bridge. After crossing the bridge, get off the minecart and follow the railroad tracks to the right. You’ll see two train wrecks; enter them and follow the tracks through the wreckage. Behind the train wreckage, you’ll find a coffin; open it.
Coffin #2 – Chapter 3: After the Flood
Immediately after you first use the harpoon from the boat to detonate a mine, you’ll see a hotel in front of you. BEFORE entering the hotel, turn right onto the flooded city path. Here you’ll see two mines on the left; detonate them with the harpoon. Take the boat to the end of the area and enter the building in front of you through the opening. Simply go down the path and you’ll see a coffin.
Coffin #3 – Chapter 3: After the Flood
After leaving the hotel area, you’ll find yourself in a large open sea with a huge cannon on the central island. Take the boat to the right, around the cannon. Behind the cannon, in the back left part of the sea, you’ll see mountains and a niche you can drive through. At the end, you’ll find a coffin.
Coffin #4 – Chapter 4: No Shelter
After making your way through a dark room with sleeping enemies you can’t step on, you’ll soon reach another room with three child enemies who will attack you and a large hole with a rope in the middle. Immediately after killing the three enemies, go through the door in the lower left corner to find a coffin. Grab it BEFORE interacting with the body on the rope; this will complete the chapter!
Coffin #5 – Chapter 7: The Loot
In Chapter 7, you’ll have to navigate through several trenches and reach a bunker, where you’ll use an elevator. After the elevator ride, pick up the bolt cutters in the operating room (this is part of the story). Use them to open the door in the hallway, then proceed through the room with exploding soldiers. You’ll need to wait for the soldier in the back right corner to explode to blow a hole in the wall.
In the next hallway, run past the exploding soldiers on beds until you turn right. As soon as you turn right, the wall behind you will explode, revealing a wheelchair. TURN AROUND and enter the exploded wall. You’ll find yourself in a secret room with a large wheel. Turn the wheel to reveal a staircase, go down, and find a coffin.
Important: The trophy and secret ending won’t unlock immediately; you’ll need to play through the story again in normal mode (9 chapters in total). However, this time you won’t need to search for anything else. After the normal ending, you’ll experience a second cutscene—Reanimal’s secret ending. You’ll see five ghosts from the coffin hugging a girl, and the well overflowing. As a reward, you’ll receive the “Reunion of Friends” achievement/trophy.
