ANIMAL WELL Reviews

Me looking at the game's screenshots for the first time: - Christ, why does it look so awful? Why would anyone play it? What do you mean "all reviews 95%"?? Me after playing for a bit: - Wowowow (c) Monoko Me after getting to the first credits roll: - OH! MY! GOD! (c) Janice I haven't played many metroidvanias/platformers but this one is definitely my favorite from now on

A great metroidvania, very well polished, designed and thought-out. It was immersive throughout the whole thing and the puzzles just kept getting more and more interesting, if you're a fan of exploration and puzzle games this will hook you up for a while. The gameplay mechanics are simple and fun, they restrain you and limit your capacity of exploring the world but this in fact only forces you to think outside the box and look for unique and fun ways to use the tools at hand to explore and reach your goals. No idea is too wild on how to use a tool or solve a puzzle, and there's about a million ways to go through this game. The fact that this is achieved in a manner that seems effortless and organic really makes this game shine, when you play it for the first time, it truly is unique.

This is a really excellent exploration puzzle game. It's hard to even describe the atmosphere in it. It's kind of ghostly and mysterious. The main game takes about 8-10 hours to beat but hold on there. There will still be mysteries to unravel and secrets to find. I haven't 100%'d it but people say it's about 30-40 hours if you want to. The puzzles are extremely well done too but I can think of at least one that's far too obscure. Anyway, the entire map is used so if you've got blank spots, get out there and explore!

OUTSTANDING GAME. A stylistically unique Metroidvania but with puzzles instead of straight combat. This game has had such a lasting imprint on me. Hats off to the one-man-show of a creator, really!! A beautiful, super engaging piece of art, all things considered. The only cons are that I didn't like really having to scrape the map over and over to try to find things. And that there are some things in this game that are impossible to know without looking it up. Lol. (No worries, I was not going to kill myself for 100% in this game. Lol.) But those cons are so negligible. --BUT-- I literally still periodically think about the feelings, visuals, environments, sounds, characters, and things I experienced in this game. There's no dialogue in this game and you just feel and experience EVERYTHING. Just really, really impressive, Mr. Billy Basso!

ANIMAL WELL is a meticulously crafted and deeply atmospheric puzzle-platformer that invites players into a mysterious and surreal world full of secrets, wonder, and danger. Developed by solo creator Billy Basso and published by Bigmode, the game emphasizes exploration, subtle storytelling, and environmental interaction over direct conflict or handholding. It's a game that rewards patience, curiosity, and close attention, offering an experience that feels both intimate and immense, despite its minimalist presentation. From the very beginning, ANIMAL WELL establishes a distinct tone with its eerie pixel art aesthetic and haunting, ambient sound design. The world is dark and subterranean, illuminated only by bioluminescent flora and the occasional glow from your limited tools. Every screen feels intentionally designed, and the lack of traditional exposition gives the game an otherworldly, almost dreamlike quality. You are dropped into the world with no context, no instructions, and no clear objective, making every discovery feel genuinely earned and meaningful. At the heart of the game is its exploration-based gameplay. The labyrinthine world is dense with hidden paths, interconnected shortcuts, and cryptic puzzles that often require lateral thinking rather than straightforward logic. Progression is nonlinear, and many of the challenges hinge on creative use of tools you collect along the way. These tools—none of which are weapons—enable new types of interactions with the environment. For instance, a bouncy ball or a bubble wand may seem playful or simple at first, but later reveal complex, multifaceted utility as puzzles grow in complexity. ANIMAL WELL never explains itself directly. There are no tutorials, mission markers, or dialogue boxes to guide you. Instead, it trusts the player to observe, experiment, and deduce. This approach makes solving a puzzle or uncovering a secret feel incredibly rewarding. It also means the difficulty can be variable—some solutions are elegantly intuitive, while others may stump players for hours. Still, this design choice gives the game a sense of depth and permanence, encouraging multiple playthroughs and community collaboration to unearth its most obscure secrets. The animal-themed inhabitants of the world are both adorable and unsettling. Despite the title’s whimsical suggestion, many of the animals you encounter present threats or cryptic behaviors that add tension and unease. Encounters with these creatures are often ambiguous—you don’t know if they’re friend or foe until you observe them long enough. This uncertainty enhances the game’s atmosphere, keeping you cautious and alert even in seemingly quiet moments. Visually, the game employs a restrained pixel art style that manages to convey a wide emotional range through lighting, color, and movement. Every area has a distinct feel, from glowing fungal caves to abandoned machinery and dripping stone catacombs. The sound design complements this perfectly, using ambient noise, subtle musical cues, and sudden audio shifts to maintain a constant sense of mystery and unease. Together, the visual and audio design immerse you in a world that feels alive and alien, despite its retro simplicity. What sets ANIMAL WELL apart is its refusal to compromise its vision. It does not seek to entertain through spectacle or action but rather through quiet discovery and reflection. It’s a game that doesn’t care if you see everything the first time through—or even the tenth. It plays like a love letter to the Metroidvania genre, stripped down to its purest form and then reconstructed with a modern sensibility for nuance, subtlety, and nonlinear design. In conclusion, ANIMAL WELL is a captivating, intelligent, and thoroughly original game that values player curiosity above all else. Its tight design, cryptic world, and deceptively simple mechanics come together to form an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a game that invites you to linger, to question, and to explore not just for rewards, but for the joy of understanding a world that never speaks yet says so much. For fans of thoughtful, atmospheric indie titles, ANIMAL WELL is not just recommended—it’s essential. Rating: 9/10

Honestly quite disappointing. This game is less than half the game it should be due to everything before 'postgame' content being too easy and over-tutorialized. As a point of reference I have not played many metroidvanias, just Hollow Knight, Environmental Station Alpha(ESA), AM2R, and Touhou Luna Nights. Animal Well's presentation is good. It has a unique style, and the atmosphere is good. The only problem with it is variety. Everything in this game is some shade of green, blue, brown, or gray. And there is not enough music variety. As for the gameplay, it is a puzzle-platformer. The jump hight is fixed, making jumps with a low ceiling more difficult than that other games, and it has notable coyote time(if you don't know this is when a character can jump in midair just after leaving a platform), and there is no limitation to in air control. There are two notable upgrades to movement, the [spoiler]disc, and the bubble. The disc with good timing allows you to fly horizontally. There isn't a visual or audio cue to get the timing, so it is a bit hard. The bubble wand is similar, but it instead creates temporary platforms for you. With good timing you can jump, bubble, than land on that bubble(I find this more fun than the disc trick because the timing feels less arbitrary).[/spoiler]That is all the movement, and if that sounds sparse that is because it is. And if that weren't bad enough, you get an [spoiler]upgraded bubble wand at the end of the game, which can make infinite bubbles, making the bubble trick unnecessary[/spoiler], thus effectively removing the most fun movement tech in the game. And making you feel foolish for completing [spoiler]egg rooms with the non-upgraded version[/spoiler], although I think that is a pet peeve of mine. I would rather it not exist. When comparing the platforming to ESA, animal well falls short, but still shares the same problems, with late game upgrades making challenges significantly easier, making it feel like I wasted my time with something that was unoptimal and unintended when going after optional objectives. Ideally, optional objectives should be challenged whenever the player wants to and has the required items, not be put off until all items are acquired. Come to think of it, hollow knight does a good job of it, because the final movement upgrade is not all that late, and there is no hard optional challenges sprinkled throughout the map like animal well and ESA. The puzzles are, unfortunately, worse than the platforming. After each upgrade you are given a simple puzzle that is essentially a 'did you remember you have this item you got a minute ago' check, then the second puzzle is only a baby step more complicated, and so on and so forth. Then, if a puzzle can't be solved, that is because a part of the puzzle is hidden or you are missing an item, and after you find it, it becomes trivial again. I think hiding a part of the puzzle is fair enough in an exploration game, but the game should not play this card as often as it does. And the non-puzzlebox puzzles often are only as complicated as do as you are told. [spoiler]You find a sequence and play it on the flute[/spoiler], that is it. A few times there are multi-room puzzles that require going to switches in different rooms, and I like these more, even though these are also pretty basic as well. The puzzle difficulty goes up in the game, but it goes from trivial to easy, to a few medium difficulty puzzles at the end. As far as I understand, there are actually difficult puzzles in the postgame, but I don't want to find or do them. If they were attached to a better game I may have. In Animal well there are no large postgame areas. The areas that are postgame are all just a few rooms. While in other games there are entire secret optional areas. One to note is the [spoiler] path of pain[/spoiler] in hollow knight. [spoiler] That is a gauntlet of difficult platforming[/spoiler]. And in ESA there are [spoiler] secret areas that while not as large as normal areas, don't feel short on content with difficult platforming and boss fights.[/spoiler]

In the technical aspects of game design (sound design, graphics, controls, friction of play, difficulty, stability, performance) this game is nearly flawless, I think. The creator is clearly very technically talented. Unfortunately, this is let down by a lack of artistic/creative direction, and probably poor playtesting. As another reviewer said, this game completely lacks any context or narrative. There appears to be no symbolism and no hint at any meaning behind anything. There's no story, and it doesn't provoke any kind of thought or have any artistic spark, which is honestly quite bizarre given how technically competent this game is otherwise, and the strong superficial impression of style afforded by the art style and the trailer clips. The takeaway is that, despite the strong convention for this genre of game to be at least partially story-driven (think Hollow Knight; Ori and the Blind Forest), Animal Well isn't an artistic or narrative-driven game whatsoever. The only appeal is to players who are satisfied by platforming/puzzle dexterity challenges and especially those who are 'completionists' and who like 'achievements' and such. For some reason, the dev placed a large number of secrets in the game that nobody could ever reasonably figure out on their own. I read a review before playing that warned me of that fact, so I made sure to pay special attention to the surroundings. I also am generally quite good at these metroidvania sorts of games. But even then, I played through the whole game without ever finding out that there were any "warp songs". One of them is relatively easy to find, but it requires the player to stand on one of two specific tiles and wait for a fish to jump out of the water and tell you the tune. This is poorly designed, because the player has no reason to stand on those tiles, and is conditioned throughout the game to believe that all aquatic creatures are hostile anyway, so there's no reason to stick around and watch the creature. In a more professionally designed game, the game would subtly lead the player to do this on their own, through level design and sound/visual design. For example, maybe a conspicuously long pier that looks different to anything else in the game, and serves no clear purpose... then when you stand on the pier, you see the fish and it makes a huge splash, then it gives you the tune. (Also, maybe throw in a reference to the Mamba fish from Link's Awakening, while you're at it.) For 90% of the game, it's a relatively relaxing experience, interspersed with puzzles and sections of chain-jumping off of bubbles. This requires a high level of dexterity, which many gamers today have, but it needlessly excludes a large potential audience for the game who will be unable to enjoy it. Also, the remaining 10% of the game is chase sequences, which suddenly add an unwelcome tension and pressure and large spike in difficulty to what is otherwise a relaxing experience. I don't like it when a game switches genres half-way through like that. The game treats secrets as a collectathon, and doesn't really offer the player a substantial reward for finding any given hidden passage. Another issue is that despite the amount of end-game content (which is all filler and figuring out things by giving up and looking them up on wikis etc), there isn't any clear place where you can see what portion of things you've found, or what you've left to find (there's a place where you can see a 3x3 grid of candles. This tells you how many of the game's 9 candles you have lit. But even this "secret tracker" is itself a secret of sorts. The game is annoyingly obtuse.) It feels a bit like the creator got bored of making this game at some point, and started stuffing it with ever-more obtuse secrets for the post-game, and they lost perspective on how obtuse all that content is because they didn't have professional playtesters. The game lasted me only 7 hours. I unlocked the movement upgrades pretty early, but they're not very complicated and don't interact with each other in any particularly interesting ways. A couple of the upgrades are only for specific situations, and don't help you in a general way with exploration, which makes them pretty lame finds. The second half of the game was trivialised by the fact that I had the movement upgrades, which detracted from my enjoyment of a large portion of the game. The result is a game that lasted me only 7 hours, and I never really got to unlock any cool or interesting toys to play with. I never found any of the six(!) warp songs, and neither would I have needed them anyway, because the game is too small in scope to make good use of them. There's no discernible artistic vision and no thought provocation from this game. It feels a bit soulless and empty like that, despite how technically competent it is. Currently, the game is priced at 37 AUD. This is definitely too expensive for the short duration and the lack of any creative/artistic value. There's no narrative, no symbolism, no themes, et cetera. It's just a technically competent platformer, and a very short one at that. I do not recommend this unless it is half-price and you're especially keen on metroidvanias.

较难的平台跳跃游戏，融合了优秀的解谜，探索，还有收集元素。有些关卡非常困难，但是它们的的质量绝对值得耗费时间反复尝试，熟练了以后也能做到轻松一遍过，非常有成就感，即便是平台跑酷苦手的我，也愉快地玩到通关了

It has not only that rare sense of wonder and discovery, but it reminds me a lot of getting lost in old ZX Spectrum platformers like Roller Coaster or Jet Set Willy. I always pick up the game thinking I'm just going to explore a little, and end up discovering something that feels like a secret. Fantastic level design.

No one's gonna see this review in the sea of nineteen thousand other reviews, so no point in going into detail, but I just had to say: Animal Well is what I've been wanting from a Metroidvania for years. It's all about the exploration, puzzles, and acquiring items that enable or enhance your ability to do those two things.