Animal Well is a weird video game. That sounds like a very broad and judgmental statement, but I’m quite confident that no matter what your experience level is with games, you will probably find some aspect of this game pretty weird. If you fall outside the game’s target audience of experienced puzzle-platformer enthusiasts, the very concept of a “Metroidvania” is likely something you haven’t encountered. Even if you are in that demographic, Animal Well further distinguishes itself from other Metroidvanias with its heavy, mysterious atmosphere and focus on exploration rather than combat. In many aspects, there truly is no game quite like it, even across the many platforms on which it is playable: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.
Oddity aside, Animal Well is no doubt a highly impressive game, especially considering it was Billy Basso’s first-ever solo development project. It manages to blend the puzzling with the platforming in creative and intriguing ways. Perhaps its greatest strength, though, is that it always finds means through which to compel players to dive deeper: not just into the world itself, but into the puzzles that lie within it. Through its clever approach to platforming and puzzle design, Animal Well rewards players who are curious enough to look for the smallest hidden details, as well as determined enough to push past its occasionally rather steep difficulty curve.
Metroidvanias, as an overall category of games, are defined by nonlinear exploration through huge, sprawling environments. Animal Well leans heavily into this nonlinearity in its level design, routinely encouraging players to “go off the beaten path” and traverse less obvious routes. This dynamic is well-realized from the very beginning of the game, when you’ve only just learned the basic movement mechanics. The giant squirrel on the right-hand side of the screen might compel you to proceed to the right; and if you have any previous experience with other platformers, you might initially assume that moving to the right is what you’re supposed to do. But suppose you were perceptive enough to notice the small area of the leftmost wall that looks slightly different from the other terrain. Proceeding that way instead grants you an interesting, unique collectible that cannot be found anywhere else.
The collectible doesn’t drastically alter anything about the game—you don’t even learn what it does when you get it—but the process of finding it conveys an important message from Animal Well to you: “If you find alternative paths through the world or alternative solutions to puzzles, you get something cool!” It’s the Discovery aesthetic in full swing, further reinforced by the Fantasy aesthetic brought about by Animal Well‘s strange visuals and deeply cryptic (embedded) storytelling. Throughout the game, not only is the environment interesting to explore from an artistic point of view; exploring it often brings direct benefits in the form of new mechanics, items, or narrative details.
Animal Well does not take very long to start presenting players with difficult puzzles, usually in the form of tricky platforming challenges. Getting past these puzzles can sometimes be surprisingly time-consuming; I’ve played my fair share of Metroidvanias, and even I got hung up on many of the earliest puzzles in the game. Importantly, though, these puzzles do not interrupt or detract from the process of exploration and navigation; in fact, they usually feed directly into it. Puzzles in Animal Well often span multiple rooms, having players interact with objects in one place, move to another place, then return to the first place to continue onward. For instance, the switches needed to open a certain gate might lie far outside the room where the gate itself is found, or a button pressed in one corner of the map might reveal a hidden pathway in another corner. In this way, puzzles inherently are the means by which players explore the environment. Completing a puzzle does not simply grant you access to a new area; rather, you access new areas in the process of completing a puzzle. Below are some smaller examples of this from the first hour or two of gameplay, in which the solution to the puzzle requires “thinking outside the box,” literally and figuratively.
Animal Well is able to justify the complexity and difficulty of these multi-room puzzles because of its proclivity for rewarding player curiosity. Though they can sometimes be formidable or take quite a while to figure out, the puzzles are rarely uninviting; and indeed, spending the extra time to find hidden alternative puzzle solutions is worth doing more often than not. This dynamic certainly doesn’t work on every puzzle; some require nearly-frame-perfect platforming skills that can be frustrating to learn, while others (like the one demonstrated below) throw bizarre new obstacles at you with very little warning in a way that can sometimes feel cheap. Overall, though, the puzzles are a nice complement to the platforming, giving players a reason to investigate every corner of Animal Well‘s massive map and persevere through some of its tougher, rougher patches.
Ethics Question:
At its core, Animal Well is a Metroidvania that assumes that the player has played a Metroidvania before. Though its mechanics are simple compared to other Metroidvanias like Hollow Knight or Ori and the Blind Forest, it expects players to quickly adopt some pretty notable mastery of those mechanics. I would not be surprised if younger or more casual players were intrigued by Animal Well‘s interesting premise and visuals, but were deterred by its approach to platforming difficulty or gaming literacy in general. The game’s smaller tutorial sections may help to ease people in, but it minces no words about being a “hard game,” which inherently excludes certain types or groups of players.
