People are calling Animal Well a Metroidvania and they’re wrong. I assume they saw “side-scrolling indie 2d pixel game with a map where each rectangle corresponds to a single room as you navigate various biomes” and knee-jerked, but that’s really just the aesthetic. There’s no real direct combat, no real “upgrades”, no powers or movement abilities, no missions, no “right” order to tackle the game, and no dialog to guide you at all. It’s just you in an incredibly player-hostile spooky environment full of animals.

Instead of “powers” or “skills” the only things you get to help you are “tools”, but they’re all super unique (save for firecrackers, maybe), and nearly all have multiple distinct uses, all of which you just have to figure out. You’re not going to get “Double Jump!” and now know “Oh I’ll just go back to all those places that were just barely out of reach!”. No, in Animal Well you get a yo-yo, and now you can yo-yo. Figure it out.

Animal Well is a puzzle game with the occasional jump-scare, and it is a puzzle game of the deepest and most obtuse kind. Puzzles range from “you can walk through this wall” to “use four different tools in multiple ways to do something very specific in this room” to “decode secret etchings and play a song” to “fold the origami bunny we just sent to your printer and decipher its secrets”. The puzzles are highly varied, make use of all your tools, and more often than not require novel use of your tools, and combination of tools, and precise timing. Sometimes they’ll require finding hidden knowledge, sometimes they’re based on navigating the environment and having a sense of how two spaces connect, or might connect, and other times it’s just about interpreting what the animal you’ve come across is trying to convey.

Some of the highest praise I can give this game is how subliminal the tutorializing is. There’s an incredibly common trope in games – especially Metroidvania games – where the game will periodically grab you by the skull and instruct you directly:

“Look here, idiot. We’re going to show you how to do this kind of puzzle. We’re going to use this kind of puzzle repeatedly ahead, so we need to make sure you know how to use your little baby fingers and barely functional baby brain to do this thing.”

A couple times over the course of the game Animal Well will throw a puzzle at you and you’ll go “huh, that was a neat puzzle”, usually a very “mechanical” push buttons -> do thing puzzle. Then a few rooms later they will put you in a room with an animal that seems like it’s being helpful, but it took a swipe at you when you were in range, and there’s a puzzle here but it’s not super apparent what to do but you figure it out… and then maybe two or three rooms later you realize wait it was the same puzzle. It was literally the exact same puzzle except an animal was involved. Shortly after describing this to someone else, I realized that on top of all this, the switches for the subliminal “tutorial” had icons matching the animal. And they had that everywhere in the game. The “tutorial” didn’t start with that first puzzle, it started days ago, clear across the map, and I couldn’t even tell.

The vibes and overall aesthetic of the game are extraordinary. It sits unnervingly between chill and hostile. You don’t know why you’re here, you don’t know why the animals are here, and it’s never super apparent if the animals are on your “side” or not, their opinions range from indifferent to “unwary but would eat you given the chance” to “is already actively consuming you”. The art style juxtaposes your unassuming little blob vs varying sizes of animals, but how they’re depicted varies as well, from semi-realistic looking penguins and cranes to ducks that just look like Weird Little Guys and undulating cartoonish nightmare-fuel ghost dogs. It’s all over the place, but it works. The game also doesn’t just have strict pixel art, similar to other games recently it mixes pixel art with volumetric smoke and light effects and does so very tastefully.

I played through the first “layer” of the game (basically just roll credits) in about 5-6 hours, and then spent a couple more hours hunting puzzles (the game’s second layer), and then dove in the deep-end of spoilers until wrapping the second main “layer” in nearly 12 hours. I have read about what’s left and it is absurd, on par with Fez, The Witness, and Tunic. If you are the specific kind of weirdo who loves these kinds of games, do not read anything else about this game before playing it. Highly Recommended. Easy GOTY candidate.