Animal Well is a tricky beast. At its heart, it’s a puzzle game. Sure, it’s a puzzle game with some platforming elements, and a bit of a metroidvania progression structure, but ultimately it’s a puzzle game.
I am not the best at puzzle games. I’ve never done a review of Baba is You, or Snakebird, and my review on Obra Dinn is by no means the most positive. The only reason Obra Dinn has a writeup is because I did in fact “beat” it.
Quick note. Animal Well is the first game released by Big Mode, Dunkey’s publishing house. If this is the standard for the quality we can expect, awesome. It’s not game of the year for me, but it will probably be for someone.
Return of the Eggra Dinn
So, did I beat Animal Well? Well, yes. But actually no.
Getting to the credits for Animal Well is not a very long journey. Both me and a friend who played it got there in about 8 hours. In this sense, Animal Well is not a very long game.
But if you play the game like this, you are probably missing most of it.
Like I mentioned earlier, Animal Well is a puzzle game. There is some platforming, but nothing incredibly difficult, and there are item pickups. But a majority of the game is trying to figure how to progress, and where to progress.
It’s a fairly unguided experience. After starting the game up, the player is shuffled through a set of semi-linear linked zones that function as a tutorial for the general mechanics (jumping, climbing, using items). But since this is a puzzle game, they also function as a sort of tutorial of what to be doing. There are zones hidden behind vines, there are small secret areas. Animal Well is trying to teach you its language.
Even from the start, ignoring the obvious path and going left reveals a secret egg. The first few starting screens are chock full of things to return to, and secrets to find, once you have picked up the right items.
This is the key lesson that Animal Well teaches: question everything. Check everything. Are there pixels missing on a map? It’s probably a secret entrance or area. Can you see something suspicious? You can get there. Come back later.
It’s a brilliant sort of puzzle, and for a majority of the game, it works quite well.
From here on out, any additional discussion of the game requires what I’d consider spoilers. If you love puzzle games, and clever hidden things, here is the time to stop reading. You can go buy the game, and discover them yourself.
Spoilers, and the great egg hunt
Since the credits rolled, I have played a bit more, bringing me up to just shy of 24 hours. I have found 60 of the game’s 64 secret eggs, several other associated secrets, and generally just explored a fair amount. It’s that exploration and investigation that makes a majority of the game’s content.
Most puzzle games are linear, or at least somewhat contained. Animal Well isn’t. Here’s an example. About halfway through the game, it’s possible to discover a set of Lynx cubs in cages. Playing music notes causes lights above their cages to blink. A bit further on, the player discovers a set of arrows on a wall.
It’s not such a big leap to then try to play those music notes near the cages, and voila, one of them opens up. It turns out though that there are five sets of these patterns, and only the first is visible in normal light. The remaining 4 require special light sources to show up, specifically the lantern.
Except the last pattern doesn’t show up with the lantern. It requires the blacklight. The game never signals that the black light exists. It’s possible to find 4/5 patterns, and then go insane searching for the fifth one, because you don’t have the right item yet.
Digital Easter
This is the struggle I have with Animal Well. It both demands a sort of breezy, as you go, come back later approach, combined with obsessive paranoia. Investigate every cranny. Search every nook.
For a majority of the game, that approach is rewarded, because there are secrets around every corner, hidden eggs behind every vine, bonus puzzles and secret rooms.
But in the late game, that starts to dry up.
The point at which I decided to call it a day was when I discovered a chest I didn’t know how to open. In the late game, the player gets a device called the remote. It can be used to activate switches remotely, and also scan for chests. It pinged a chest near a large patch of grass, so I decided to investigate. I tried every item. I wandered around looking for entrances. I tried to figure out how to get into this chest.
What is the solution? To scan a piece of grass above the chest with a barcode scanner.
I did not figure this out on my own. It’s entirely possible that the chest doesn’t even have an egg in it. But it’s there. It showed up when I scanned.
The knowledge of this solution was the moment that I decided I was done with Animal Well. The game had won.
Conclusion
Animal Well is fascinating, but it demands a level of attention and effort I didn’t feel like I could give it to finish out the game. The correct way to play would be to screenshot the map, and then comb through it nook by nook, and cranny by cranny.
And I don’t want to do that. There are other games to play, other things to explore, I do not have the patience or ability to continue to drive myself nuts searching for one last thing.
Animal Well is $25 on Steam. If you loved Return of the Obra Dinn, maybe give it shot. And let me know your thoughts on twitter.
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Post Script
Since writing the rest of this article (Okay, 90% of it minus the conclusion), I looked up the locations of the 4 eggs I missed, and a few other things about Animal Well.
With that cheating done, here are some additional thoughts.
One of the eggs I just completely missed. I think I would have eventually discovered it.
The remaining three eggs are based around a single interaction with a specific item: the rubber ball. This interaction is not explained, or even demonstrated in any way with the item. It is (somewhat) hard to discover, because it triggers only in very specific circumstances. Of those three, two eggs were in locations where I was confident there was a secret, but didn’t know how to access it.
I then went and completed the final egg secret ALMOST entirely by myself, (it has a very clever final trick to it that I looked up). What was my reward?
Access to hints about the meta-game puzzles and ARG in Animal Well. At which point, I called it a day. I might look these up at some point, and do some of them, but frankly, I didn’t earn them in any sense, and they’ve already all been solved.
I think my ultimate take on the game, given that I’ve seen more of the structure now, is this: it’s built up in such a way that it tries to pull you in deeper bit by bit, first with searching for the flames, then the harder eggs, then the meta-puzzles. But because the whole game is a giant puzzle, I got lost easily