During a girl’s night in 2018, my lifelong best friend and I created a Neopets account for the first time since middle school. We ordered dinner and agreed to split custody of our pets, getting started as we waited for the food. Given the circumstances, we wanted to keep indulging in the Neopets nostalgia, so weheaded to YouTube in search of someone playingto watch while we ate, and this was my introduction to a creator I’ve come to really enjoy since then, videogamedunkey.
Six years later, Dunkey still uploads to YouTube, but his latest venture is with Bigmode, the indie publisher he leveraged his internet notoriety to create. His claims when he debuted the company were an on-brand style of grandiose, butthe publisher’s first launch has been more than enough to silence any doubters. Having laughed along to his videos over the years, I expected something lighthearted and silly to come from Bigmode.Animal Wellis, in so many ways, not that at all.
I’ve never had a wellspring of patience, per se, and my already dribbling font keeps drying up as I get older. I was around when games like QWOP, The Impossible Games, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and plenty more titles designed specifically to frustrate were the fixations of the internet zeitgeist, but I never understood their appeal.
That stance has, until now,extended to Metroidvanias. It’s a genre whose hallmarks are all the things I hate: hairpin precision, confusing, circuitous level design, and learning through failure.They’re not exactly for people like me who are prone to grinding their teeth to dust.
There’s a great example of my exact sentiment in Dunkey’s Neopets video. One of the minigames he plays is an old-school flash platformer with some pretty rough enemies, and his struggles are exactly the things that make me avoid Metroidvanias on the whole.
Animal Well kind of snuck up on us here at TheGamer, as it did, it seems, with the entire internet. The game had a booth at PAX East this year, and there were people playing demos anytime I walked past, but I never made time for it myself. On a packed show floor with a busy schedule barely permitting me to see things Iwasinterested in, I didn’t exactly prioritize a game in a genre that I dislike.
After PAX, Animal Well was out of sight and out of mind until my boss asked if I’d be able to write some guides for the game, given its sudden and bombastic popularity.TG’s Eric Switzer reviewed the gameand had nothing but good things to say, as has the majority of the internet, with Animal Well sitting at a 91 on Metacritic.
It wasn’t long into playing myself that I understood what Eric and many others online had been saying – go in knowing as little as you can and work it out yourself. I was told ahead of time that there was no combat in Animal Well, but what a surprise it was to learn that you very much can (and definitely will) get killed a few times.
The first time I encountered a spirit in the beginning area, I found myself on the Switch’s home screen taking a deep breath. “This is going to be a long game,” I said to myself, nostrils flared in annoyance. But alas, I had a job to do, so I composed myself, went back into the game with some ofEric’s beginner’s tipsin mind, and tried to approach the puzzle differently. I couldn’tfightthe ghost, but I could light a candle to prevent it from spawning.
I felt a bit more at ease knowing that unconventional was going to be the convention here, so I grabbed the map from the next room and climbed the ladder out of the starting area. I was filled with a sense of curious dread from the four enormous and off-putting statues, pausing for a moment to soak in the atmosphere my colleague had been praising for a couple weeks. I ventured left from the starting area, thought I was casuallygetting my first inventory item, and was quickly and savagely mauled by the ghost of the dog statue I had only just discovered a second or two before.
Everyone has a moment where this dark, dreary game that begs you to go in cluelessly clicks. Our Editor-in-Chief, Stacey Henley,wrote about how it was the Ostrich puzzlethat made her “get” Animal Well. Eric said in his review that the vibe of the game overall was something you either “get” or don’t. For me, that moment was getting attacked by a ghost dog so immediately after encountering the mysterious statues. I was filled with questions, and I needed answers, but instead, what I got was killed.
Animal Well might exist in a genre I don’t traditionally enjoy, but I’m definitely not finished playing it - even though I’m technically “finished” playing it. Animal Well is a far, far cry from the kinds of animals I was looking for when I first found Dunkey a while back, but what a cool destination this game has been on his career journey. It might not be enough to make me a Metroidvania fan– my favorite things about it are the things that make it not so much like other Metroidvanias – but it has, at the very least, got me reconsidering my blanket sentiment of “hate” for the genre.
