Animal Well

Animal Well is a puzzle-platformer game about discovering how far you can go down the well of animals. Within its metroidvania-style environment, players solve puzzles using the items and the knowledge they’ve collected along the way. Animal Well cultivates a huge sense of mystery, with secrets tucked in every corner and multiple layers of cryptic puzzles.

The game begins as a standard metroidvania, with a feeling of adventure and a lush, sprawling open-world map split into several unique biomes. Various animas inhabit the well, and it often looks like something fantastical is on the verge of happening. Getting lost in this game is part of the experience, as you decide where to go next, but you also have a map to help you out and track your progress.

Animal Well features multiple layers. The top layer mostly consists of platforming challenges and simple puzzles. The second layer requires a keen eye and some trickier puzzle-solving to discover secret collectable eggs. Beyond that, there are deeper layers that require the player to make observations about the environment and solve even more cryptic puzzles—keep in mind that everything is here for a reason. In this way, it is quite similar to Fez, another cryptic puzzle juggernaut.

There are elements of rule discovery, as each item that you discover has more uses than the initial one the game tells you about. You are encouraged to try your items on a variety of different mechanisms in the world to see how they might interact.

Logical reasoning is at the core of many puzzles in the first layer, and it shifts more towards lateral thinking as you descend further into the layers. Observational skills are key no matter what layer you are on—sometimes the solution is right in front of you. The lore is sparse as well, and piecing together what is happening in the well requires a number of deductions.

Animal Well is a mix of metroidvania and metroidbrainia: there are items to collect throughout the game that give the player new abilities and allow more puzzles to be solved, but there are also tricks and codes that can be learnt from the environment to uncover secrets and solve even more puzzles.

Though Animal Well is largely a sedate, go-at-your-own-pace game, there are a handful of scenes featuring unpleasant-looking creatures, and they might put off players who dislike horror and chase sequences.

This description was written by Hira and edited by Oriane Tury.