As I continue my playthrough of Animal Well, I look at my desktop covered in tatters of notes. There are carefully drawn symbols on scraps of paper, an array of numbers scribbled down on Post-it notes, and the words ‘M. DISC’ in all caps on the back of a hastily grabbed cat food receipt. The tabs open in my browser include charts for Morse code, binary, hexadecimal, and a webpage explaining the rules of nonograms. I also have a list of clock times in my phone’s notes app noting when a strange in-game alarm goes off. I have no idea if any of these will be useful, but I have them ready anyway. If this game is sending me invisible signals, I don't want to miss any of them. It’s safe to say that I'm completely and utterly under Animal Well's spell.
Animal Well is a puzzle platformer where you play as a blob birthed from a pink flower into a dark and damp underground world. Playing as this little being, you're left to spelunk through the undergrowth's many caverns, surviving deadly encounters with the cave's unwelcoming dwellers and solving various puzzle rooms you find. With no dialogue and minimal text, your only reason to explore is pure curiosity, and it’s a curiosity that gripped me from beginning to end.
I say ‘end’ but more accurately I mean the first 'layer’. Solo developer Billy Basso says that this puzzle adventure has multiple layers to it, and as I enter my 20th hour with the game, I’m still unsure of how deep this well actually goes.
From its first hour, Animal Well nails the Metroidvania golden rule of making you want to explore. A spider-web interconnected caverns filled with drooping vines, lush plant life, and mossy floors have been left undisturbed, and beyond the well’s natural attributes are the endless shrines, statues, and murals embedded in its many caverns. The game's visuals reinforce this ambience, as classic pixel art is presented in an entirely new way when coupled with expressive lighting and fluid smoke effects. The whole effect makes you feel like you're wandering through an ancient, long-forgotten realm. A limbo space somewhere between the living and the dead. It’s a world so evocative and bewitching that I couldn’t help but want to see more.
You’ll need to keep on your toes though, because in this strange, twisted ecosystem you’re at the bottom of the food chain. You can meet your end being mobbed by crows, pecked to death by a giant ostrich with an unsettlingly long neck, or chased by a phantom cat with a wide grin and sharp teeth. There’s no combat so when you encounter one of the well’s dangerous residents, you’ll need to use your wits to outsmart them. Thankfully, this ecosystem differs from the one in survival adventure Rain World where snapping jaws lurk around every corner. There’s lots of breathing space for thinking and considered exploration (that’s not to say you won’t get chased by the occasional giant Kangaroo with an attitude). When there are boss fights they’re puzzle-centric, and much more focus is given to creating tension and suspense rather than actions and thrills. When you die, you’re cast back to the last point you saved your game, but any frustration with dying dissolves with generous save points and lots of fruit to restore health.
Alongside Animal Well’s strange locals are its puzzles, which involve lots of pushing buttons, opening doors, triggering switches, and moving platforms - pretty standard puzzle-platforming elements. Sometimes a puzzle will be in a single room with a series of mechanisms you need to solve, but other times it’ll be a collection of rooms that all connect in some way. These styles of puzzles - ones where you’re presented with a series of mechanisms to solve - are entirely logic-based. They’re tasty brain scratchers that require a combination of thinking and tricky platforming (some puzzles require you to move quickly and accurately).
You'll have some help though. A key element of Animal Well's puzzle-solving are the items you pick up as you explore the well. Without giving too much away, they include firecrackers, a yo-yo, a bubble wand, and others. Getting familiar with these items and learning their capabilities and limits is essential, and not just for solving puzzles. Exploring the world also requires you to experiment and use your items in surprising ways. Examining the space - the hanging vines, the layout of the ceiling, the dips in the ground - together with what tools you have to work with will let you overcome tricky parts of exploring the well. Getting creative with how to use each item effectively is its own kind of satisfaction and the game constantly rewards you for lateral thinking. I almost felt the game rewiring my brain to think more creatively and to think outside the ‘rules’.
This combination of logical and lateral puzzle thinking made playing Animal Well constantly exciting and engaging, and its dense atmosphere and otherworldly residents always coaxed me further into its world. For those whose interests stop here, the game is compelling enough to recommend it on those features alone. But, there’s so much more to this game. False walls, hidden tunnels, weird symbols, strange noises that systematically sound off, weird contraptions waiting to be woken up - areas are deceptively flooded with details and clues. There are lots of invisible puzzles for those looking, and making sense of all of these hints opens up a whole other layer to the game.
If you'd like an indication of how these secrets will play out, look no further than what Basso did for Animal Well's Day of the Devs preview. He hid a bunch of clues in the video that led eagle-eyed viewers on a virtual Easter egg hunt that included hidden URLs, encrypted messages, a cypher from the 1500s, and a Picross nonogram. It's a statement that says two key things about Animal Well. The first is that Basso is serious when he says that he’s put puzzles in the game that will take people literally years to solve, and the second is that it sets a precedent about the kind of mysteries and secrets players can expect from this game.
I’d love to highlight this point with my findings, but I’m worried that even the slightest hint towards any of the game's solutions will dispel some of the allure. But I will describe my experience with one example: my relationship with Animal Well’s map. At first, I used the map like any other game map. I'd check it for directions and occasionally mark places of interest. But the longer I played the more I became engrossed in it. I would examine every pixel trying to work out what its placement could mean. Could the absence of a pixel in a wall mean a hidden tunnel? Or was it just a natural gap because of the map's layout? My time with the game has made me feel intimately connected with the map. I would get into the habit of examining every pixel and then setting off to investigate. A deviously clever feature of the map is that it doesn’t let you zoom in to get a closer look, so I found myself physically moving closer to get a good look.
It's a great representation of the game as a whole. You’re always kept at a distance, forced to look closer. It's a game that pushes you to look, to really look at the details and piece it all together. If you like the worldly mysteries in Outer Wilds, the alien ecosystems of the previously mentioned Rain World, the dense atmosphere of Hollow Knight, or the endless puzzles of Fez, you're in for a treat.
If that sounds like too much for some, don’t feel intimidated. Animal Well is totally accessible for those wanting a compelling puzzle platformer and would also like to reach the credits. But it’s also a puzzle game completionist's dream. There’s something here for all kinds of puzzle lovers, which is quite a game design feat. With all its secrets and mysteries, it masterfully captures that in-between space of being an object outside of its own world, and that’s something we’ve not seen in a long time.
Disclaimer: Thinky Games is part of the Carina Initiatives and may have professional relationships with individuals and businesses related to the subject of this article. Please see our Editorial Policy for details.
