More Like Animal Well Done

Published on May 20, 2024

Animal Well seemed to be on a lot of folks' "oh boy, here comes a good one" radar for some time before release. Or maybe it was just Danny O'Dwyer at Noclip, since he's the only person I can specifically remember being excited for it. In any case, I got the sense that a lot of people were bought in at the time of the game's announcement.

Not I! It looked to me like any one of a dozen other retro pixel art love letters to Old Games, and I was not in the mood for another one of those. It didn't seem like anything special. How wrong I was.

I've been in something of a video game rut lately, just sort of slowly making my way through Tactics Ogre: Reborn, a game I've been playing on and off since January. So when a bunch of cool-looking indie games dropped all at once this month, I was primed to dive into something, anything, new.

After trying out some demos on Steam, and grabbing a handful of games that had recently been recommended to me, I decided to pick up Animal Well on Switch. It did look pretty cool, after all, and if I was going to play a game like that anywhere, it would be on Switch in bed. Thank god I kept an open mind.

Animal Well is first and foremost a game about secrets. So thoroughly is it comprised of secrets that rather than talk about the game itself, I've spent about 250 words setting up my history with the game, and am probably going to spend much of the rest of this review talking about the limits of video game terminology, so as not to spoil too much.

I'm kidding, of course. Unless...

Animal Well is, in many ways, a Metroidvania. For the uninitiated, this is a real, actual genre of video game. It has its own category on Steam and everything. It's a term that people who play video games use to describe games that are a lot like Metroid games, Castlevania games, or both.

This is just the weird way video games have decided to talk about themselves. Film and literature have fantasy, sci-fi, romance, rom-com, drama, etc. Video games have "it's kinda like that game Rogue, you ever play that one?" Of course not. No one who ever played Rogue is still living.

It might be more accurate to describe Animal Well as a puzzle platformer, since it lacks the combat of a Metroid or Castlevania, instead being more akin to something like Fez. But at the same time, Metroidvania doesn't feel inaccurate because of the game's map discovery, item gating, and screen-by-screen camera movement. In that way, it feels very much like 2021's Axiom Verge 2, another game I liked very much, and which is definitely a Metroidvania.

No matter what you want to call it, Animal Well is a damn good game.

From start to finish, the one and only driving force of the game is curiosity. "What's over there? What is that thing? How does that work? How do I get there? What do I do with this?" The questions in your own head about how the world works and what you're supposed to do are the only things leading you on. There are no hints, no overt narrative conceits, and no explanations. It's just you, the game's mechanics, and the vibes.

This is, for me, an effective hook on its own, but it is made even more effective by the game's aforementioned vibes. The art and sound design create such a weird, spooky labyrinth, that you are compelled to explore deeper and learn more about just what the heck is up with this place.

I don't think I ever once got lost or stuck while exploring Animal Well's spooky caves. The map system is robust and easy to read, and every screen is unique and memorable. The game is also extremely good at communicating your long-term and short-term goals. When you first open the map screen and see nothing but four blinking icons spread out in various directions, you very naturally think, "I guess I'll start moving toward one of those until something happens." You'll figure out the rest!

I never felt the urge to look up the solution to a puzzle, not only because I didn't want to spoil the incredible experience of unfurling Animal Well for myself, but also because the unfurling just naturally happened the more I poked at it.

The game's items each bring something new to the table, and give you multiple interesting ways of interacting with the world that are entirely up to you to figure out, and extremely satisfying once you do.

A quick spoiler to illustrate my point:

When I realized you could jump on the disc after throwing it, and ride it as it flew through the air, purely because I threw it across a room once and thought, "it would be really cool if you could do that," I lost my goddamn mind.

Animal Well has me thinking I should check out more Metroidvanias, and my love of Axiom Verge 2 might make me do just that, but honestly, when I think about it, I just want more games like Animal Well. Take a Metroidvania, strip out the combat, and make it all about the exploration, puzzles, and secrets. A conversation between the player and an initially inscrutable clockwork world. That's what I want.

In delivering what I might only be able to describe as the platonic ideal of itself, Animal Well might just have given me more itch than scratch. But that's not such a bad problem to have.

Besides, I still have a lot more eggs to find...