The Besties · Russ Frushtick, Chris Plante, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy

Reanimal Is Like Limbo with Friends

February 20, 2026·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

One host argues Re-Animal's co-op mode fundamentally destroys its ability to be a horror game.

Reanimal enters through the monster door. The cold open settles into Tarsier Studios horror naming, where Little Nightmares-style creatures get mocked, renamed, and somehow made grosser by committee. The Sniffer takes damage right away. Someone pitches Flesh Getter, which sounds less like a nightmare and more like a guy out there shaking hands, so the bit becomes Flesh Sniffer and keeps hanging around. That is the rhythm here. The game talk keeps criticism and nonsense pressed together, with the panel treating creature design, achievement names, and horror branding like material worth taking seriously and pelting with jokes. Reanimal still holds the episode together. By the end, it shares space with a wider State of Play rundown, so the shape is one focused horror-game segment that keeps getting pulled into the announcement swamp. Control talk sounds cautiously hopeful. The panel likes the idea of running through a badly warped New York City, while still pointing at the old itemization and gear issues that kept the previous game from fully landing. Death Stranding 2 turns into a hardware prayer. March 21 gets repeated like a chant, mostly because sitting near a PS5 for long stretches sounds rough, while a Rog Alley X version sounds like rescue if it actually runs. DLSS shows up as hope with instructions attached. Nobody acts certain, but dynamic scaling makes portable Norman Reedus walking feel a little less absurd. Metal Gear Solid 4 arrives with baggage. Master Collection Volume 2 feels inevitable because Volume 1 already did the obvious thing with a number, but MGS4 still brings out strong, uneven reactions. The first act gets respect. The rest sounds less like nostalgia and more like everyone poking an old console bruise. Then the leftovers roll through. Meugenics, Delicious in Dungeon, and Board get name-checked before the close, with Board causing a small SEO panic because searching for a game called Board is exactly the kind of self-inflicted internet problem that tracks. Resident Evil Requiem hangs around as the next possible target. The episode's best move is letting Reanimal set the horror mood, then proving the panel can turn even a release-date chant into criticism with elbows.

As heard by us

A funny, fast Besties roundtable where Reanimal's horror weirdness rolls into a packed State of Play catch-up.

The Besties use Reanimal as a springboard for the kind of loose, ridiculous games talk they do best. The opening bit about Tarsier Studios monster names turns a horror-game detail into a full comic argument, with the hosts picking apart whether something called "the Sniffer" can…

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Why you'd press play

You want a horror-game chat that turns monster names into actual criticism.

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