It’s hard to say what my expectations were when I went intoAnimal Well. Thanks to the excellent foresight of TheGamer’s own Eric Switzer, the game had been on my ‘one to check out’ list for a while, and was also buoyed byits status as Dunkey’s first game as a publisher. A general ‘it’s good’ from Eric is usually enough for me and has previously steered me to the likes of eventual TheGamer Games of the YearThe Forgotten CityandCitizen Sleeper.
But suddenly, Animal Well went from a hidden gem to a runaway hit,smashing past 90 on Metacriticand being hailed as one of the year’s defining indies, overshadowing the early access launch ofHades 2. It went from the great unknown, a game that might be great and that would give me the joy of discovering for myself, to being put on a very precarious pedestal. It could no longer just be great, ithadto be great. This little indie by a solo developer and first time publisher was suddenly weighed down by the albatross of expectation. So far, my feelings about the game can be summed up by an encounter with an ostrich.
Animal Well Is Not Your Everyday Metroidvania
Animal Well does not waste time explaining itself. You begin this Metroidvania by heading through basic platforming screens until you reach a point where things branch off. Typically in Metroidvanias, there’s one way to go. Speedrunners might cut corners - known as a sequence break - but there is a critical path that you must walk to get the necessary upgrades in the correct order. This critical path may allow for wrong turns, but make no mistake, they will be wrong. Animal Well is more open -there is no single correct way, and no matter which way you go, you will discover something you may’t access just yet. At the same time, whenever you hit a dead end (either because of a lack of upgrades or simply hitting a puzzle you can’t outsmart), there are multiple paths forward behind you.
Once you get out of the opening linearity, four statues represent the biomes - the seahorse, the wolf, the chameleon, and the ostrich. It would seem there is some kind of boss (though the game has no traditional combat) at the end of these pathways, but I’ve always gotten turned around before reaching them. I have, however, encountered both a seahorse and an ostrich on my travels, and while I need to play a lot more Animal Well to know how I feel about it, and make progress in one significant direction instead of running around in circles, I’m always going to look back on this ostrich as the moment I understood the game.
I hit a save point that coincided with a dead end, so I turned around. Having dropped down to this place, even going backwards was a form of going forwards into new territory, and there was a range of platforming puzzles. With each one, I struggled at first, but as I died again and again, they eventually became second nature. There was a zigzag of obstacles I had to time my jumps around, some floating platforms that disappeared in light, hazards I had to slip between in careful rhythm. All of them taught me two things - that precision was key, and that it was always easy once you knew how.
Animal Well Is A Test For Your Thumbs, And Your Mind
I had to replay some sections five or six times over at first, but once I figured out the timing, I could rush through them with my eyes closed. Then came the ostrich. This long necked bird marches across the screen to peck at you, but there are underground tunnels to hide in. In these tunnels, there are four buttons to push to open the door to the next area. Like the other causes of my death, a simple enough challenge. Except it suddenly wasn’t so simple.
When you go off screen in these sorts of games, the hazards are supposed to reset. But dipping into these underground tunnels, I was horrified to find the ugly beak of the ostrich following me as its neck contorted around the platforms. Each tunnel has two exits, but you need to leap at the exact right place at the exact right angle, all in the dark, in order to make it out alive. I died more to that ostrich than all the obstacles on the way combined, even with the firecrackers hastily gathered to briefly frighten the beast off.
If Animal Well doesn’t click for me, I will think back to that ostrich, to how many challenges I had to clear each time just to reach it, to how inescapable it was, to how eventually surpassing it just lead me to another room with more puzzles I couldn’t do yet and another route back to where I started, all for nought. If I end up loving Animal Well, and I sense I might be on the precipice of doing so, I will think back to that ostrich, to how much better I got at the game over such a small and simple stretch, of the relief of defeating it, of realising the game would not go easy on me. Animal Well is the ostrich. I just need to figure out what that means.
Animal Well
WHERE TO PLAY
Shared Memory’s Animal Well is a Metroidvania with exploration, puzzles, and platforming. Billy Basso’s game takes place in a dense labyrinth filled with animals.
