Review: Animal Well

Published:

I love a good Metroidvania, I’m fascinated by it Metroid 2: Samus Returns as a child. These games allow you to grow as a player along with your character as you absorb knowledge from the world and discover up-to-date skills, which is stimulating and incredibly rewarding.

That’s what I expected Animal well. I was enamored with it when it was revealed as the first game published by Videogamedunkey’s Bigmode, and I stayed away from most of the marketing videos leading up to its release. I went into it fresh, with no expectations, which is exactly how this game should be received. Animal well is full of surprises, each of which makes you feel intelligent when discovered and delivers reward after reward with each session. Even if these sessions cause a lot of frustration at first.

- Advertisement -
Screenshot by Destructoid

Animal well starts with an introduction to a cute little seed creature that is your gentle protagonist, sheepishly exploring the world around you. It’s shadowy and damp, but airy seeps in where it can, from diminutive campfires, bioluminescence, or cracks overhead. Traversal seemed straightforward enough, and I found it to be a regular, tedious rehash of the Metroidvania/platformer genre: follow a path, unlock up-to-date abilities, repeat. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Shortly after the first rooms opened, Animal well it lets go of your hand and expects you to learn through the visual language it uses to communicate. It might be a group of ladders close enough together to jump between, a moving platform with a hole nearby that you have to reach, or a set of buttons with a closed door.

using saliva in an animal well
Screenshot by Destructoid

Main reason Animal well is to explore the world and collect all four flames marked on the map. It’s a loose goal, but it’s grounding, providing direction when you hit a wall and don’t know where to go next. These hints are also a suggestion, not a demand, so you can ignore them. The map displays every room you find and the routes between them, so you can always look for the path not taken if you feel like you don’t understand something.

There’s always enough information on each screen to eventually figure out if there’s a way to move forward with the tools at hand. And if there isn’t, those screens stick in your mind as parts of the map you’ll have to return to later. It’s an environment that teaches you how to adapt quickly, so you’ll eventually find yourself navigating the game world much as you might the roads or paths around your home. It’s a sign that Animal Well’s world design has hit the nail on the head, hitting that sweet spot between being overly complicated and so straightforward it feels empty.

While not every room is a puzzle, there’s always something to find. It could be a hidden path, a crate with an egg, or a bewildered creature that didn’t expect you to find it. It’s full of mystery to the point that I’d stay up behind schedule playing, often thinking about the puzzles during the day, and using the time between dropping the kids off at school or running errands as a break to think of the next solution.

Something I like Animal well is how mysterious and full of puzzles this world is, considering the relatively few items you’ll find as you explore. The Bubble Wand lets you create a bubble and jump across larger gaps, the Disc is a great tool for hitting hard-to-reach buttons, Slink can assist you with puzzles that seem to require two of your characters, and the Yo-Yo is an instrument of chaos that deals damage and distraction in equal measure.

Every single item has multiple uses, some of which you’ll have to figure out yourself as you go. The environment design has elements that should assist you figure them out on your own, but you’ll be no less amazed when you test an idea and it somehow works.

salty chameleon in the animal well
Screenshot by Destructoid

To take full advantage of Animal wellI recommend trying to play without looking for solutions to the rooms, to feel the same sense of growth as the subject becomes even more intricate before your eyes. Both in terms of the evolution of the world and the items you acquire.

This is where developer Billy Basso’s approach to metroidvanias really shines. Resources are restricted, but you’ll expand your skills by acquiring up-to-date tools and navigating rooms specifically built to act as upgrade chambers. There’s never any ceremony, and the tools never change. Instead, the puzzles you solve improve the tools at your disposal; they force you to find up-to-date uses for them.

A great example is the Yo-Yo. Initially, it’s presented as a way to reach buttons on corners, under platforms, and generally out-of-reach areas. However, specific puzzles force you to experiment, helping you understand that animals are drawn to the Yo-Yo, which can cause them to press switches for you or completely transform a room by reversing certain mechanical cues.

The tight control scheme helps these things work so well. You can tell how much time and effort went into figuring out exactly how far and high your character can jump, and every puzzle is built around that as a default. It makes everything feel fair, even when you’re frustrated.

There are no inexpensive gimmicks in this game, just very well-constructed puzzles designed around how you move and what your tools can do. It takes you through so many challenges that you start to see the solutions as if you were Neo looking at the Matrix. To me, platformers like this live or die by the most basic of movement controls, and Animal well is so brilliant in this area that it’s easily the best game of this genre I’ve played in recent years.

As with most 2D puzzle platform games, Animal well has secrets. There’s a huge set of collectibles that I’m still working on as I write, which give you a reason to run through each room again and explore them in ways you never would have thought otherwise. Like everything in the game, they play a much bigger role than you might think at first, adding to the already massive amount of rooms, puzzles, and items to discover.

cat boss in the animal well
Screenshot by Destructoid

While exploring the well where Animal well is set, you will feel the story told by the environment. Again, I won’t spoil it here, but I can’t leave out the phenomenal bosses. Traditionally, boss fights are where games like Metroid fear AND Tales from the Kenzer: Zau They sparkle. They are shiny, tightly designed and filled with explosive moments that make you sit wide-eyed as you watch the spectacle on screen.

Animal wellThe bosses are no less impressive and tough to defeat, but you don’t fight. In fact, there’s no fighting in the game at all. You’re a helpless, defenseless seed creature in an ecosystem that’s already established itself around you and doesn’t want to be messed with. As a result, you have to find clever ways to defeat each boss, using the knowledge you’ve gained from the rooms you’ve explored and the tools at your disposal.

The only one I’ll mention is one you’ve probably seen in trailers for the game: the cat ghost. Defeating this boss is a mystery in itself, and defeating him is a challenge that took me hours to complete. What’s so impressive about it is how mute the spectacle is. This enemy chases you; there’s haunting boss music, and you can hear the creature making unsettling sounds that make you want to put the game down and walk away. But there are no big-budget cutscenes, no special moves. The idea is to complete the game using your skills and knowledge of the world.

The same can be said about the whole thing Animal well. There is some music, but most of the sounds you hear are ambient wells from the creatures that call this world home. Everything meshes together perfectly—music and visuals—because at its core, this game wants to showcase the beauty of nature.

boss seahorse in the animal well
Screenshot by Destructoid

The 2D pixel graphics are truly refreshing after so many high fidelity 3D games, and the limitations they bring have been improved upon to make the world Animal well stand out. Vines grow down from the ceiling of the well, but will move if you run through them, resulting in a attractive rustling animation. The creatures in the well are recognizable, though visually unique to this world, and seem almost ethereal and spiritual.

This adds to the environmental story, but also makes your character stand out. The diminutive seed creature is a radiant airy in a shadowy world. It’s a joyful little soul among archaic beings who are too aged and too scared to venture far from their huts.

Animal well is packed with more things to do and secrets to discover than most other games, yet it maintains a distinctly independent charm. It feels much bigger than what first impressions promised me, enchanting me with a world I could listen to and watch all day long, and offering up some of the most satisfying gameplay of 2024. I’m grateful to have experienced it knowing so little, and I urge anyone sitting on the fence to embrace it wholeheartedly until the darkness and biologically powered airy sources of its world envelop you in your attractive, if somewhat chilly, up-to-date home.


Related articles