I am so bored of open-world games and more likely than not, so are you. Of all these big bulbous games congratulating themselves on how big their worlds are and how overflowing they are with content, I can still count on my fingers how many games have satisfying exploration. Elden Ring, Teary Breath of the Wild Kingdom … uhh … Tunic, and Animal Well. A cat chewed off the rest of my fingers. Thankfully, I only need four fingers to play Animal Well. Every single moment of Animal Well was one of pure delight. It is so satisfying how little the game gives you in terms of context and direction. It’s weird because these qualities are usually necessary in a game but with solid design, you can transcend them. That’s a good word to describe Animal Well: transcendent.
I’m gonna have to add Billy Basso to my list of developers to keep an eye on. His name makes me think he’s a Marvel character with his superpower being in game design. This guy did everything: the programming, the sound design, the art. He even built the engine that he used to make the game. It’s hard to even fathom how pendulous this man’s nutsack is. With help from Dunky’s publishing company, Big Mode, Animal Well has achieved some well-deserved attention and credit. If you don’t know who Dunky is, are you even a gamer?
Animal Well is available on PS5, Switch and Steam for $24.99
Story – It’s About Animals.
So all the cute animals have fallen into a well and you have to solve a bunch of puzzles to save them all. Or, like, there���s this evil beast hidden deep in a well and you have to slay it. No wait, it’s a trapped animal and you have to free it. And four evil animal spirits are in your way, or something. Or they’re trapped too and you have to save them even though they’re hostile from being trapped. You get the point; there is no story. Or if there is a story, there’s so little context for it that there might as well be none. And that’s the point.
Animal Well doesn’t want to hold your hand through anything. That seems to be the mission statement of Animal Well: no hand-holding! As you progress, you find new areas and meet new animals that will be either hostile, placid, or scared. It leaves everything completely open for you to make up whatever you want the story to be. You’re just a little blob guy born in the middle of this world, after which it’s up to you to decide what happens.
Animal Well Review – Evil animal spirits, or imprisoned victims?
The Metroidvania Genre has Elevated
It is a Metroidvania so there are the usual tropes of progression. Travel around until you find an item or upgrade that lets you travel to more parts of the map. Repeat until all sections are traversed and all treasures have been found, a solid loop right there. Other Metroidvania’s tend to try to achieve a feeling of growth through avatar strength. You’ll beat some boss that will give you an upgrade that makes your attacks longer or stronger, or you’ll now have a charge attack that shoots an energy wave or something. These are more things that Animal Well has deemed unnecessary.
Other Metroidvanias are less open and more pseudo-linear. You may have a few options on how to traverse but to progress, you need those upgrades and items. You need that energy wave to unlock the door to the next area of the game. In Animal Well, you can get pretty much everywhere by jumping. And a lot of the puzzles are designed in a way to be solved by jumping alone.
It can get pretty scary at times
Some areas require items and keys, and most of the puzzles are solved by using items, but the feeling is different. In other games, you unlock the progression item by completing some challenge and you seek the items out to progress. In Animal Well, you just kinda stumble upon the items. You come across a slinky and think “Okay, the hell does this do?” then once you learn what it does, your brain is instantly filled with ideas. Every stairway pattern in the game turns from a random piece of platforming to a potential puzzle. And, again, there’s no hand-holding at all. You spend the whole game experimenting and discovering. Animal Well has one of the purest forms of exploration I’ve seen in a game.
Gameplay – Proper Puzzles
The list of things Animal Well deems unnecessary grows as we get into the gameplay mechanics. No upgrades, no battle mechanics, no dashing or double jumping, or other superfluous movement options. You walk left or right and you jump. You get an item that makes bubbles early on that makes movement more interesting and it’s one of my favorite items from any platformer. Somehow, Animal Well has pulled off the seemingly impossible task of removing all the flair and fluff while still creating a game without a single dull moment.
Still haven’t figured out this puzzle
It provides simple movement made challenging in proportion to how many creases are in your brain. It’s a puzzle game, so you shouldn’t expect it to have anything too flashy in terms of mechanics but instead hold high standards for the quality of puzzles. Animal Well not only meets but breaks those standards. It achieves this by having some of the best tools I’ve seen in a puzzle platformer.
Collectibles
There are two main collectibles in the game. Mostly, you’re collecting eggs that work similarly to the moons in Super Mario Odyssey. They’re the main reward for completing the puzzles and after you collect them all, it unlocks more content. The other main collectible is tools. There are other things you collect like matches to light candles but those are more specific. The tools are what you use to solve the puzzles and they’re unlike anything I’ve seen in a game. Most games tend to have things like a hammer that can break through special walls or whatever. In Animal Well, they’re all toys. I already mentioned the slinky but there’s also stuff like a spinning top and a yo-yo. These child-like items give a game an eery Goonies-like feeling. You’re trapped deep in this dark well with all these animals but you’re still a kid playing with toys.
Animal Well Review – The dog spirit and their minions
Beautiful Bubbles
The most useful item in the game is the bubble wand. It creates bubbles that you can jump on for a single-use platform. When you create them they rise up but once you jump on them, they slowly sink to the bottom of the screen. This adds a lot of complexity to otherwise simple platforming. I don’t know if I’ve played a platformer that lets you create your own platforms before, but this is game-changing. It’s such a simple way to add a skill factor. Once you perfect jumping on bubbles as you create them, so you can keep jumping from bubble to bubble, you can dominate any verticle segment in the game. And it’s so rewarding because that’s a skill you taught yourself.
Animal Well Review – This whale hungry!
At the heart of it, the main thing that makes Animal Well so great is how much freedom it gives you to figure things out for yourself. With that said, there will inevitably be things that you will completely miss. I’ve played through it a few times now and I still have no idea what the deal is with the timid gopher.
Graphics & Sound – Ambient and Charming
We’ve all seen articles at this point explaining how scanlines from old CRT TVs made old games look better than they do on modern TVs. The comparison picture of Alucard from Symphony of the Night still cracks me up. Basso understood this concept and made it the focal point of Animal Well’s aesthetic. The artificial scanlines help bring what would’ve been basic shapes and patterns to life. All the animals have so much personality to them. Even though they’re just 2D sprites, the scanlines allow our brains to add complexity to their designs that isn’t actually there.
Animal Well Review – Pretty colours
Every single screen is saturated in charm. It also helps that Basso created the engine, so all the lighting and particle effects aren’t just templated assets, they’re by his design. And it shows. A lot of modern retro-style 2D games incorporate 3D effects that can look out of place at times. In Animal Well, everything blends seamlessly, creating a surreal environment that exists in its own space between dimensions. Few games look this good.
The soundtrack to Animal Well is barren. Besides a few tracks that kick in when exciting stuff happens, most of what you’ll be hearing is sound effects. The sound effects fit the aesthetic, very retro-sounding. Most of it are gamey type beeps and boops but some of the effects in the more gripping parts can be rather terrifying. They opted out of having distinct and memorable tracks and went for more of an atmospheric feel which seems to be the trend with exploration games such as this.
