ANIMAL WELL

I keep returning to the moment ANIMAL WELL stopped being a metroidvania and became something harder to name. You are a small, soft blob hatched from a flower, holding nothing, surrounded by beautiful and occasionally terrifying creatures, and the game simply trusts you to figure out what that means. No tooltip, no quest marker, no NPC to explain the rules. The entire thing was built by one person, Billy Basso, and that singular focus is felt in every room. What you are doing, at least on the surface, is hunting four flames trapped across a dense, interconnected underground well. You collect tools rather than weapons: a Bubble Wand that lets you chain jumps by riding your own bubbles skyward, a Yo-Yo that pulls distant objects and animals toward you, a Disc you can ride across open gaps, and an Animal Flute whose eight notes unlock fast-travel points and trigger effects scattered all over the map. None of these are explained to you in text. The game's level design is the tutorial, and it is patient, confident, and genuinely brilliant. Puzzles are built around creature behavior as much as items: you redirect mice running in wheels to flip platform directions, you time your movement across the back of a roaming snake, you use firecrackers to clear dark rooms haunted by ghosts. Combat, in the traditional sense, is almost entirely absent. Dangerous animals are puzzles to be outsmarted, not health bars to deplete. The atmosphere is the other argument for playing this. Pixel art with modern lighting sits somewhere between a glowing terrarium and a damp fever dream. Plants rustle as you walk through them, hanging lamps swing when you bump them, mist warps the light in background layers. The sound design is equally intentional: save rooms feel audibly safe, most corridors give you only the soft percussion of your own movement, and the rare moments when an oversized animal notices you and the whole screen starts to throb with low, hostile drones are genuinely unsettling. This is one of the most atmospheric things I have encountered in the genre, and there is serious competition on that front. The layering is where ANIMAL WELL earns its Metacritic 90 and its place in conversations about the best of 2024. Finishing the main objective is one thing. Finding all 64 eggs hidden across the well opens a secret ending. Beyond that lies a third layer of secrets so obscure that the community has spent over a year coordinating to crack them, some of which may still be unsolved. A pixel-art bunny mural you can edit with a Remote item. Wingding symbols hidden in dark corners pointing toward puzzles the developer himself did not expect players to find. If you want that community discovery experience, the launch-window crowd has already mapped the known territory, but going in fresh with a notebook and a curious friend is still a genuinely different kind of play. Where the game earns fair criticism is in its later stretch: the tone shifts from puzzle-first to platform-precision, checkpoints can feel sparse, and the Ghost Dog chase sequence in particular tests patience more than intelligence. A minority of players will hit that wall and disengage, and that is a reasonable response. For anyone drawn to the Fez and Tunic end of the spectrum, to games that treat the player as an intelligent co-author of meaning, ANIMAL WELL is the real thing. Six to ten hours gets you to credits. The well goes considerably deeper than that, and it never pressures you to go further than you want.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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