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Animal Well
Released On: May 9, 2024
7.8
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 27 Critic Reviews
91
89% Positive
24 Reviews
24 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 27 Critic Reviews
91
89% Positive
24 Reviews
24 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Animal Well is packed with more things to do and secrets to find than most other games.
Animal Well is a masterclass in puzzle design, with tight platforming, set in a beautiful, oftentimes perilous world. It's actually at its weakest when it's just a Metroidvania, and instead, its world and the genre serve as a way to deliver some of the most intricate, interconnected puzzles of any game I've ever played.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 191 User Ratings
7.8
70% Positive
133 Ratings
133 Ratings
15% Mixed
28 Ratings
28 Ratings
16% Negative
30 Ratings
30 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 191 User Ratings
7.8
70% Positive
133 Ratings
133 Ratings
15% Mixed
28 Ratings
28 Ratings
16% Negative
30 Ratings
30 Ratings
By far the best metroidvania I've ever played, better than SOTN, Hollow Knight ,and Super metroid to name a few. The pure sense of exploration, puzzle solving and uneasiness give the game an atmosphere that blows a majority of games I have played out of the water. The way the items and world weave together and the plentiful secrets make this game a mile wide and a mile deep. My only complaint was that the game took only 13 hours unguided to complete gathering all eggs and all major items. Although that might be for the better since the game does a good job of being a complete package and I don't know how they could have continued it past the other deeper secrets in the game.
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PC
Nice Art and Gameplay, with Mood holding all together, just a fun nice treat to play, short and sweet. I finish it by accident because I was lost in it.
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PC
The fascination of those lingering unknowns is part of why Basso's remarkable indie debut takes up residence in your brain when you're not playing it. But on a more fundamental level, it is simply a beautifully constructed, wonderfully characterful adventure, one that marks the blossoming of a major talent. [Issue#398, p.98]
Animal Well is a Metroidvania that stands out in a crowded marketplace thanks to a lack of combat and some seriously creative power ups.
The level design is excellent, the platforming controls perfectly after a short time to get a feel for it, and the moody art is far more detailed with fancy effects than its pixely nature shows in screenshots. The heart of the game is its mysteries, though, whether that be something as basic as scanning the map for breaks in the wall that indicate a missed secret passage, or realizing that one of the tools has a less-obvious ability that completely changes how useful it is. Even beating the game is just another step towards solving it, because the credit roll means a whole new set of more intricate puzzles has opened up. Animal Well is a stunner of a metroidvania, usually charming but frequently creepy, mysterious but by no means unapproachable, and filled from top to bottom with secrets that are always satisfying to uncover.
Uncover secrets, evade dangers, and embark on an eerie journey in ANIMAL WELL. Billy Basso has crafted a dark neon aesthetic and enigmatic gameplay that delivers a Metroidvania unlike many others. The mystery and cryptic puzzles won’t be for everyone, but those who enjoy a challenge and a good platformer will be rewarded with a haunting adventure.
If you want a solid and quirky adventure that will put your reflexes and puzzle-solving to the test, Animal Well is an absolutely fascinating journey.
Best game since Cubivore for the gamecube. Even has a Capybara on it... God damn.
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PC
Beautiful game with an amazing atmosphere and some decent puzzles. However, as the difficulty ramps up near the end, the game goes from clever and fun to being overly fiddly and extremely frustrating. By the time I finished the first ending I basically had enough. Also a bug where an item was picked up during the credits but did not end up in my inventory essentially stopped me from playing the game any further. If you like metroidvania's and games where you die over and over to complete a difficult objective (think Elden Ring) then you will love this game, otherwise I would be wary.
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PC
Animal Well is a competent metroidvania that overstays its welcome and relies too heavily on cryptic puzzles for my taste, especially in the "end game".
The game starts out as a pretty standard metroidvania. You wander around, find items that make it possible to explore more areas, rinse and repeat. This section is genuinely quite fun. The items are quite novel, and there were many interesting combinations of uses to find. During this phase of the game you will find a number of secret "eggs", which are the games main collectible. In true metroidvania fashion, many of these eggs will not be possible to get until you unlock more movement items, requiring you to backtrack to the item. This backtracking is par for the course for metroidvania fans, but it is more annoying than usual in this game for a couple of reasons. First, the movement of your character and the environment is very slow, even fully upgraded, making backtracking a sludge. Second, some items are locked behind finishing the game the first time, making for a lot of frustrating moments, where I couldn't understand how to get some item, only to look it up out of frustration, realizing that I needed to finish the game first. This is contrary to usual metroidvania logic, where you are compelled to finish whatever you want to before entering the final area, so it would've been nice if this change was communicated more clearly.
After the first ending is when the game gets decidedly more annoying. The new items you get from beating the game require you to effectively go through every single room in the game again to find all of the "eggs". I personally found many of these to be very hard to find, and often come down to missing one tile on the screen or, very often, using the flute in the room. You _could_ certainly do all of this without looking up a guide, but be prepared to go into every room and use every item in it in every conceivable location, because otherwise you almost certainly will miss things. This section was annoying and I lost my enjoyment of the game at this stage. I think that all in all the first part of the game, with maybe half as many eggs would've been about the right length for me.
Once you've finished the egg collectathon, strap in, because now there's a whole other tier of secrets to find. "Bunnies". This is where the game goes from puzzles that are frustrating and boring to ones that are so cryptic they are essentially only possible with help from the internet. I don't like these sorts of things in games because they drive artificial hype from people finding things out on the internet and sharing ideas, but actually solving the puzzle doesn't feel very rewarding, since for almost all of them you aren't actually able to solve it yourself. Now, this wouldn't be so bad on its own, but those super puzzles bleed into the rest of the game so that I ended up spending a lot of time trying to solve these cryptic super puzzles, only to realize that they were not really meant to be solvable and weren't for the eggs I was now in the business of collecting.
So, on a whole, there is a decent metroidvania here, but I would recommend just putting it down after the first set of credits, as everything that comes after that is just too frustrating and tedious to enjoy.
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PC
Generic and pretty forgettable, it's as if the developers had thrown 10 indie puzzle platformers into a blender and then called it a new game.
Don't let the paid reviewers tell you otherwise, try it yourself, it's cheap so you won't be losing too much.
Why is it that 90% of the games being highly rated by """critics""" are mediocre at best? it's almost like a red flag at this point, never fails.
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PC
This is a glorified screensaver. There is no objective, too many places to go from the start and there is nothing happening in any of those room aside from some minor puzzles. The controllers are horrible and imprecise.
Eventually I learned it's from a youtuber and now it makes sense the brainless supporters giving this a good score.
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PC
Summary Explore a dense, interconnected labyrinth, and unravel its many secrets. Collect items to manipulate your environment in surprising and meaningful ways. Encounter creatures both beautiful and unsettling, as you attempt to survive what lurks in the dark. There is more than what you see.
Platforms:
- PC
- PlayStation 5
- Nintendo Switch
Initial Release Date: May 9, 2024
Developer:
- Shared Memory
Publisher: Bigmode
Genres: