There’s a bit of popular wisdom about games made using a retro aesthetic that says they ought to look, sound, and play like your nostalgic memory of them, rather than being actual recreations. Animal Well, from developer Billy Basso, looks, sounds, and plays in a way that, had it existed 30 years ago, might have made you think your cartridge was haunted. Though the small, round, bouncy player character resembles Kirby, the swirling oil-slick backgrounds and unidentifiable, inhuman echoing that surrounds this protagonist drench the game in a supernatural unease. It’s all so cold, dank, and unsettled that, aside from making for a particularly evocative setting, it’s hard not to imagine the hidden secrets that lie just out of view.
With its sprawling map and side-on perspective, Animal Well initially appears to be a Metroidvania, but this is mostly a feint. The game isn’t situated comfortably in the lineage of, say, Hollow Knight or Super Metroid (or even the full-fledged RPGs of the Castlevania series). Andrew Shouldice’s sly, mysterious Tunic is a better point of comparison, but Animal Well is even more of a pure puzzle game than that. There are dashes of moderately difficult platforming to break things up, but there’s hardly a trace of anything you’d call action, let alone combat.
Animal Well’s puzzles tend to be oblique, with experimentation required even when your goal is simply to unlock a door. In many cases, this means learning how the animals that populate the titular well will react to you and your actions. Dogs bark excitedly when they see you and chase you until you slip away. Birds fly beneath you to stop you from falling whether you want them to or not. Chinchillas cuddle up next to you (unless they happen to be sleeping).
These creatures hold plenty of charm on their own, with warm, detailed animations and lively sound effects often serving as a welcome relief from the game’s overarching sense of solitary quietude. But the trick is leveraging these interactions (often by nudging a creature just so) to get past whatever new barrier Animal Well has thrown in front of you.
Solutions also frequently involve the use of hidden rooms and passages, many of which you’ll need to discover in order to progress. They’re so common that it’s hard to leave a room behind without prodding at every suspicious-looking nook or breakable piece of the environment in search of a false wall. These secret spaces are often hinted at through the clever use of sounds, where parts of a screen might be obscured, but you can still hear whatever mysterious thing is lurking there, unilluminated and just out of sight. The game’s devotion to concealment does occasionally mean you’ll find yourself heading down a few dead ends before locating the critical path again, but if exploration was always easy, then discovery wouldn’t be nearly as exciting.
Often the reward for solving a puzzle in Animal Well is another puzzle, which is generally fine since the game’s puzzles are excellent. If you’re lucky, tougher tests will grant you one of a few dozen collectible eggs. Occasionally, though, you’ll find items which unlock entirely new abilities, and these items are, without exception, playful and delightfully unusual.
Despite their mundane appearances, the uses for those items are surprisingly multi-faceted. Each one has an obvious application, like the frisbee, which can be thrown to flip distant switches or destroy certain bits of the environment. But toss it around for a while and you’ll find it’s also great for distracting dogs (because dogs love frisbees, duh). It doesn’t stop there either, but giving away too much in a review would undercut some of the game’s best moments.
Despite its litany of tricks, though, Animal Well is a relatively simple game at its core, with little in the way of an overarching mystery or narrative to push you along. And while the lack of long-term hooks sometimes makes the game feel a bit slight, the single-minded attention to the in-the-moment pleasure of the gameplay creates a focus that is meditative rather than expansive. Animal Well isn’t some grand adventure or sweeping artistic statement. It’s just a boatload of tiny interconnected puzzles, woven together to form an almost unimaginably intricate web.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Bigmode.
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