Well Begun is Half Done

It’s not often you see a game like Animal Well be so hotly anticipated, but it’s not every day a massive YouTuber starts a publishing company with the expressed intention of marketing something this niche for their debut. 7 years of work from Billy Basso has resulted in a metroidvania unlike much else and a filesize of like, 40mb, which is some advanced technical wizardry. No combat here, just exploration and a whole lot of interlocking puzzles. That’s very much my kind of thing! And the game we got is…good? It’s definitely good. But it’s not great, and I’ve been struggling to articulate why for the last few days now without spoiling anything. Let me try to explain.

Animal Well is Tunic if it didn’t have terrible combat. Alternatively, The Witness if you wanted it to be a video game. It dumps you into a world with no context and minimal actual text. You can run, jump, and press an interact button. As you come to grips with the controls you’ll quickly locate your first gadget, for lack of a better word, and realize that there were at least 5 screens you just passed that you can now navigate in entirely new ways. It’s the metroidvania formula you know, but fully fixated on creating moments of discovery.

The flip side of that coin is that it features even more backtracking as a result. Get ready to recomb the map on the regular, or hit a wall in one section and drop what you’re doing to go rub against other walls until you find something you can do that you couldn’t before. It’s here that the game’s map helps out immensely, or more specifically, your ability to scribble on it. Stamps are your friend and you should use them often. Midway through the main game I had more question marks on that thing than a teacher grading a paper that was farmed out to ChatGPT.

And my experience at this point was…fine? Adequate? I was thirsting for the advertised challenging puzzles and not finding them. By the end of the main game (I know I keep saying “main game” and fully intend to explain that in a few paragraphs) AW still didn’t feel like it was really demanding much from my brain unless it was guarding an optional collectable. Even then, it was often more a question of whether or not I had the right tools and recognizing neat ways to use them than anything truly taxing. I did find environmental clues and apply that to some areas, which was pretty cool, but that’s also when I ran into my “real” issue with the game: its pacing.

There’s a difference between solving and completing a puzzle, and despite the puzzles themselves being clever when they want to be AW handles the in-between rather poorly. Pretty often you can recognize what needs to be done early on, especially if it fits on 1-2 screens. Aside from main route obstacles, most have enough execution steps and/or failure points that they take a while to finish even if you already see how to do them. Throughout the game I often completed a section only to feel more relieved than satisfied. Games only have so long to cash out their dopamine after any given revelation, and AW runs the clock way too long more often than not.

Anyway, let me explain the whole “main game” concept. AW took me just shy of 5 hours to roll credits on and that was with some egg hunting. I’d be lying if I said it was satisfying, even if the last sequence is kinda cool. Then I kept walking, saw some stuff I did not expect, and realized I’d been playing a tutorial this entire time. I think this is where the playerbase will be split. Some folks will see that and be filled with excitement, realizing they’ve got way more game on their plate than they anticipated. Others, like me, will feel like the game has been having a laugh for the last however-long. You have some really cool ideas! Why were you so afraid to show them to me?

The post game does go crazy though, and that’s all the detail you’ll get out of me on that front. I refuse to ruin how wild these puzzles get; they’re gonna fold your brain like origami. If anything, I wish the main game was equally committed to the bit? You have to invest several hours before the game deems you qualified to chew on its gristly parts. It almost feels like a lack of trust in its audience, as if Basso and Co. felt they had to implement the frog in a pot method to hold players’ attention or risk them abandoning AW prematurely. I really doubt this is gonna be anyone’s first metroidvania, so why do I have to eat so many sheets of plain pasta before I get to the good parts of the metaphorical lasagna?

Animal Well is a solid game. It’s a hell of an achievement for its developer, a striking debut for Bigmode, and I hope it makes both of them a respectable pile of money. Yet I can’t help but feel like it straddles the line between comfy metroidvania and puzzle game for sickos, and in fully committing to neither doesn’t quite manage to achieve its full potential. I like it fine, but I’m still hungry.

6/10