Like many, games have been a lifelong passion for Billy Basso, going back to his youth when he got an NES at three years old. But it took a few other hobbies and creative outlets until he settled on making them himself, namely filmmaking. During his studies, he would spend his free time learning programming, eventually taking a trip back to school to study computer science.
From there, a chance encounter with Indie Game: The Movie, some time spent in the industry at studios like Netherrealm and Phosphor Games, and a few other projects would eventually lead Basso to begin working on a game in 2017 during his spare time. That “self-indulgent side project” would later become Animal Well.
For those unaware, I'll let Basso give you the details. “Animal Well is a game where you play as a blob - a little yellow ball character. You hatch from a flower at the start of the game and you find yourself in this kind of wet, damp, subterranean-like environment. The game gives you no direction about where you are, who you are, or what you're supposed to do. There's no concise way to describe Animal Well, but that's my best attempt."
From there, the Metroidvania-inspired puzzle platformer asks little of the player. You're essentially left to your own devices: exploring the world, meeting its strange denizens, and solving the well's many mysteries. There's a great sense of curiosity and discovery, but designing a game like Animal Well is no small feat. Basso's approach caters to all types of puzzle, adventure, and thinky fans thanks to an unusual approach. “There's three layers to the game, and I'm always designing the game for three different people at any given point,” Basso says.
At its foundational layer, Animal Well is a puzzle platformer that any player, experienced or new, can enjoy and understand what you need to do to complete the game. The next layer is for the discovery and secret-oriented players. “There's inherently just a lot of optional, extra stuff that is harder to find," Basso says "And I think that's familiar to most games, where there are extra side quests or secret items or stuff. And if you want to, like, 100% the game, this is all the stuff you go track down.”
Naturally, this lends itself nicely to more puzzles and mystery, but this sentiment is taken a step further with the last layer, which Basso explains has a broader sense of mysteries and puzzles that "aren't exactly intended to be easily solvable by one person,” and instead are meant to build community and encourage collaboration, while also keeping a sense of mystery, regardless of how invested you are in the game. "If you're the most hardcore fan, there's still things you'll be wondering about.”
That last point makes all the more sense after Basso lists some of his influences: The Witness and its open world, Tunic and its sense of discovery, and FEZ being a particularly important one. “I remember being, really, really impressed and surprised by how that game would just put things in the background that felt like innocuous like decorations," Basso says. "So you can almost disguise the game as this approachable platformer, but really, there's this depth and mystery that's baked into the fabric of the world that you later get the ability to perceive."
Of course, it's still a game, and when it comes to the design of its world and how players explore, solve, and interact with it, they are in for a more open-style Metroidvania. There are fewer roadblocks and more of a focus on play-centric discovery, steeped in teaching players rules through its puzzles.
“I think Metroidvania sometimes have an issue where there's a choke point in the game progression where you need one key item, and there's one door that will unlock the next half of the game," Basso explains.
“I want [players] to be making a decision and learning a new fact, even if it's just, oh, the vines can conceal dark areas, that's just like a singular fact you can learn that at a point in the game, and there's hundreds and hundreds of little facts that the player is gonna build up a mental map of as they explore. It's like Mega Man, where you can go get the abilities and kind of any order you want, and depending on your toolkit you have, it will make later sections either easier or harder, based on what you did before and will maybe open up additional solutions or pathways that weren't there.”
With that, Basso wants players to feel encouraged and willing to try things while they play. He said as much when we discussed how puzzles and gameplay should feel to players. “I just think of puzzles as teaching players how the game works because the game never explicitly teaches you itself. So, in a sense, it's a puzzle to learn how you even play the game, and I think that's part of the fun. I want people to always feel like their ideas are valid or that the game is at least acknowledging them. So if you try something, even if it's the wrong thing, I try to always like add a little animation or reaction to something you're doing."
If anything else, Animal Well is a true passion project that Basso has poured himself into, and by all accounts, it's been a worthwhile endeavour that will satisfy fans of thinky adventure games, and that open-ended approach to discovering its rules and gameplay will make finding, solving, and overcoming the world all the more enjoyable. “Go into it with an open mind and trust yourself."
Animal Well will release on May 9th via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch.
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