Media in Review: Animal Well

15 Sep, 2024

Animal Well is a wordless metroidvania with some...unique power-ups, let's say. Your goal is to travel through four themed areas, collect a colored flame from each of them, and use it to unlock a final area where you have to do a big puzzle while being chased by what we'll generously call a boss, before rolling credits. This part of the game takes 8-10 hours to finish and is broadly pretty mediocre. I wasn't a big fan of how a lot of the power-ups work, the platforming is extremely precise in places, and it has a lot of annoying progression. That said, I was playing it as a break from something more wordy (I had just finished Tsukihime), and in that context, it fit the bill very nicely.

Of course, once the credits roll, then the real game begins. Animal Well is one of those "layered" games where finishing it isn't the end of the game, it's where you learn some new way of interacting with the mechanics and it leads you deeper and deeper.¹ In this case, once you finish the game, you get dumped back into the main hub with all your upgrades, and left to explore the world anew - though it's not explicitly stated, your goal is to collect all the eggs that are hidden throughout the world to complete "layer 2." This is a double-edged sword, because you've probably already gotten quite a few of them on your first pass through the game (I had a little over half of them, myself), but they're not marked anywhere, nor are they tracked in any way other than appearing on a shelf in the shop once you find them. Several of them are also locked behind using new power-ups in old areas, and it's genuinely pretty cool to find them. I personally bailed on it after collecting 56/64 eggs, although once you do get them all, there's another chase-and-puzzle sequence with the final boss leading to the second credits.

From there, layer 3 heads into what I will politely call "ARG shit" and move on. If I had gotten this far myself, I would have absolutely quit there because I have no time for that nonsense, although I have to admit, the game sending a file to your actual IRL printer that you then have to fold like origami sounds like an incredible puzzle.

As for what I did play, it was Fine™. The actual platforming it asks you do isn't very interesting, and it falls flat on its face every time it asks you to do a more "traditional game" thing (like a boss fight). The puzzles are best part of it, but even those get tedious. A friend described it as "a more chill La Mulana," something that I can't really disagree with (and for bonus points, I didn't really care all that much for La Mulana either, so the vibe is right). I think I would have preferred a more traditional metroidvania as my "recharge the words brain" game, but what's done is done and it got the job done. I definitely would not have paid $25 for it, so unless this sounds like something you're dying to play, maybe wait for a sale.