Animal Well

Genre: Metroidvania / Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Animal Well is a Metroidvania wit strong Puzzle-Platforming elements released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players awaken in a flower as a little blob in the depths of a series of caves and ruins teeming with a variety of fauna and flora. Players are given no story or explanation, but are left with little choice but to explore the caverns around them.

Graphically, Animal Well is absolutely gorgeous. While the 2D pixel art world around them is dark and dingy, it feels absolutely alive, with bright bioluminescent plants filled with fluid, beautiful animation, and with much of this world around you reacting to your movements. There are some great lighting and shadow effects, beautiful water effects, and some excellent smoke and explosion effects. And with tons of variety in things to see, this becomes one of the motivations to keep moving forward and seeing more of this beautiful world.

As visually beautiful as this world is, the audio often seems equally impressive. There’s very little in the way of music in Animal Well, but in its place, seemingly everything in these caverns is alive with its own unique sounds, filling the environment with atmosphere that heightens the sense of beauty and danger this place represents, helping you remain aware of your surroundings, and even notifying you of danger nearby as you recognize the sounds of violent enemies and hazards.

And then there’s the really stunning part of the presentation, one that literally made my jaw drop – this absolutely gorgeous game takes up only 84MB of memory on your Nintendo Switch. This is not just an artistic triumph, it is a miracle of engineering as well.

If this was just a very pretty, expertly put-together Metroidvania, it would be worth a look, but Animal Well also manages to be a true breath of fresh air for the genre, completely running counter to some expected norms of the genre, while doing other things that explore genre norms in interesting ways that epitomize the genre.

Unlike most Metroidvanias, there is no combat in Animal Well, even though you will encounter enemies. Some are to be avoided, others must be tricked, and yet even others must be placated or bypassed using one of the multi-purpose items you find in your exploration. Encounters that might be considered “boss battles” are about the same sort of thing you see in most great Metroidvania boss battles – pattern recognition and resourcefulness. It’s just that this time, you’ll be finding ways to survive these encounters that don’t involve fighting.

This isn’t to say that Animal Well’s main contribution to the genre is taking an element of gameplay away from the formula. In it’s place, you’ll find a world filled with some superb level design and some truly outstanding puzzle design. The puzzle design in particular is truly on another level, really making you think through the ways you interact with the world around you, and with the objects you carry.

On that note, the objects in your possession may not seem like much. What good is a slinky going to do for you? However, Animal Well is constantly showing that every one of this game’s items has been very cleverly crafted, often to have multiple uses. I won’t spoil these items here, as part of the joy of this game is discovering these new items and figuring out the ways you can use them. However, suffice it to say that any Puzzle-Platformer designer creating games at this point will want to sit down and study Animal Well for an idea how you create a true masterpiece of the genre.

Animal Well is quite good as a Metroidvania too. There are hidden secrets around seemingly every corner, tons of places to come back to after you find a new item, shortcuts that open up to prior areas as you complete newer ones, plenty of variety of locales and different kinds of challenges, and a map that’s so wonderfully detailed that it stands as one of the best maps the genre has seen.

When it comes to flaws, there are a few. Some of the platforming here is tricky enough that more novice players may have trouble with it, sometimes it’s not clear where you need to go or how to get past a certain obstacle, and it’s frustrating that treading through some areas a second time can require completing puzzles you’ve already completed.

However, while Animal Well has a few small annoyances, overall this is an absolutely brilliant Metroidvania and Puzzle-Platformer with truly outstanding Puzzle design, map design, ability design, graphical design, sound design. If you are a fan of either Metroidvanias or Puzzle-Platformers, you absolutely need to get this game. And even if you’re not, you still may feel so enamored with this game’s fascinating world that you’ll feel compelled to explore it. Either way, I highly recommend this game.

tl;dr – Animal Well is a Metroidvania with strong Puzzle-Platforming elements where players take the role of a small blob in a series of caves and ruins teeming with a variety of fauna and flora that they must explore. This game is a masterpiece of graphical design, audio design, puzzle design, and gameplay design. While it falls just short of perfect due to a few minor annoyances, overall this is a game that should be considered a must-play for fans of either Metroidvanias or Puzzle-Platformers.

Grade: A

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Winner:

Game of the Year – No other games in 2024 compelled me the way this game did, to see all of its fascinating world, to plumb all of its secrets… and by “all”, I mean “probably only a small fraction, because I’m not one of those real obsessive types”. Yes, as I’ve said before, Animal Well is a game that provides players with layer after layer of puzzles to solve, and it gives you the freedom to delve only as deep as you desire.

However, let me talk a bit about the layer that thrilled me, the one at the tippy-top. Where I would explore its strange world and encounter some dangerous creature I couldn’t see any way to defeat or get past, or some odd puzzle I couldn’t even understand. And so I’d head off in another direction, and eventually I’d find… a piece of junk. A child’s toy that’s not a weapon or some special new form of traversal, but just some little thing that doesn’t do anything useful.

Eventually, I would come to discover that toy did indeed have a use after all, and not just one, but often many. But those uses would have to be discovered, like a puzzle unto themselves. What good is a slinky when all it does is drop down a staircase and just sit there useless at the end? What good is a frisbee that doesn’t hurt enemies? These are the sorts of questions in Animal Well that hold some of the game’s most amazing answers.

It is astounding at how much brilliant gameplay has been squeezed into a game that’s under 100MB. How much gorgeous pixel art scenery, how much wonderful sound design, and how many incredible secrets, all wrapped in a game that keeps rewarding players for thinking about exactly how it works.

When this game was announced as being published by YouTuber Videogame Dunkey of all people, it was hard to take seriously. When his advertising for the game involved him going onto game sessions of Counter-Strike and trolling gamers by talking incessantly about the game and making bizarre and clearly false promises about it, I just had to roll my eyes. But behind all the absurdity and silly jokes, Dunkey deserves all the credit in the world for spotting what a rare gem this game is and making sure it saw release.

And of course, we can’t give credit without recognizing how amazing that this entire game, from the gameplay to the level design to the visuals to the sound design to even the built-from-scratch game engine… all of it was designed by one man. Billy Basso, if ever one work instantly established its creator as a Renaissance Man, this is it, and you deserve to be applauded for this absolutely insane display of talent.

Do yourself a favor and play Animal Well. You won’t get any Wonder Bread for buying it, but you will get an absolutely brilliant game that is worth every bit of hype it got. Even if it’s nothing like Halo 2 or Halo 3.

Best Puzzle Game – It says something that Animal Well has layer after layer of puzzles, each appealing to a different type of player, and yet even just having plunged through the topmost layer I was impressed with this game’s cleverness, its restraint, and the wonderful way it gently nudges players toward the answers without spoiling them. And then, once you beat the game, you can keep going to find more secrets… and if you’re the sort of crazy person who likes to pour through game code and decrypt ciphers, you have yet even more puzzles to take on. Yet this game always makes sure to meet players on their level, and never seems to ask more than players than they are capable of. This is a trait that is rare to see in a Puzzle game, and one that is truly admirable.

Most Efficient Use of File Storage Space (84MB) – While it may be a 2D pixel art game without music, Animal Well is bursting with beautiful visuals and impeccable sound design, with each of the game’s rooms bursting with intricate design, impressive visual effects, and a soundscape that paints a vivid picture of this strange place you find yourself in… and all under 100MB. And that’s not even beginning to look into all the stuff that was hidden in the game’s code for the truly dedicated puzzle-solvers to find! That so much was done with so little is truly impressive.

Best Sound Design – It’s always brave when a game chooses to have no soundtrack and let the sound effects do the talking, but it seems particularly so when you’re talking about a game with lo-fi sounds squeezed into a tiny file size. Yet with so little, Animal Well creates a vivid soundscape where every drop of water, every brush against the foliage, and every creature adds to a symphony of sounds to add to the atmosphere of the game’s varied locations, making the game’s locales sound different, and giving the overall game a wonderful signature all of its own.

Runner-Up: Best Metroidvania, Most Original, Best Graphical Style

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