Summary
I’m a little late to the party, but I’ve finally got intoAnimal Well. I fell off a couple of times in the very earliest stages of the game, but after overcoming the initial obstacles, I’m hooked. I’m collecting eggs for no apparent reason, lighting candles as I go (also no idea why), and I’ve secured one of the four sacred flames.
Presumably I’m about a quarter of the way through, before you take into account replayability. And my experience of Animal Well so far has been a perpetual cycle of intense frustration followed by ecstatic elation.
I keep getting stuck in Animal Well. The experience is much like what I imagine being stuck in an actual well would be like. It’s dark, damp, filled with weird creatures, and I cannot wait to get out. Except, it doesn’t seem in my capabilities to escape.
My Animal Well experience goes like this: I complete an incredibly difficult platforming section, dying multiple times on the way. There are enemies to dodge, spikes to avoid, and frame-perfect jumps to make. I needed to utilise my frisbee and my bubble wand, carefully managing my abilities to make it through one, two, three tricky screens. It’s a difficult challenge, but satisfying. Until screen four.
I’m faced with an impassable object. Perhaps I don’t have the right item yet, or maybe I need to approach it from the opposite direction when the puzzles compound on themselves in four hours’ time. But all that precise platforming was for naught. Even worse, the fast travel doesn’t help here, so I have to make it all the way back. I have to do all that painstaking platforming all over again.
I’m close to putting the game down after this. I need a break. It’s all a bit much, and I’ve got a massive backlog of indies I could be playing on my Steam Deck instead. But then, in the corner of my screen, I notice something new. Is that a passageway? Is it an area I can now access that I couldn’t before? A swish of my bubble wand or flick of my disc-holding wrist later, and I’ve found a new path.
This is a simplistic description of Animal Well, but it shows how clever its level design is. Every moment of hopelessness, the point at which you were about to give up, you find a spark of hope which quickly ignites into a bonfire of new discovery. Suddenly the ability you’ve unlocked makes perfect sense, and your brain makes a dozen connections to work out a new path through a previously impassable screen.
I’m not convinced I even understand how Animal Well does this. With most games, I can trace a path of developer intent to end-user experience. But playing Animal Well is a different situation. I don’t know whether I’m just a bit slow on the uptake with this game, and therefore the simple reveals seem like mind-blowing revelations, or if the small development team has worked some witchcraft to make new things appear just at the point where you feel like giving up.
There is a limit to this goodwill. There are only so many frustrations you can take before you turn off for good. But at the moment, the cycle is just about gratifying enough to keep me pushing through. As I turned off last night, I had just reached another frustrating roadblock. It wasn’t enough to make me rage quit by itself, but it was late and a good point to jump off. I’m looking forward to retracing my steps with a fresh head, and hopefully discovering a new path forward that will blow my mind all over again.
