wow thats in stark contrast to your last animal well post!
1 Like
It’s a fantastic Search Action game with incredible visual design that has secrets built upon secrets that is eventually Get All The Secrets Now and the developer straight up said “I don’t expect people to do this.”
3 Likes
Was this line on the Steam page just empty marketing or are there still mysteries in the game now that it’s been out a couple months? Is it possible for a secret in a video game to be undetected for years anymore?
To say it another way I liked the secrets in this game (to a point) more than Tunic or Death’s Door. All 3 have the idea of “I didn’t know I could do that!” All 3 boil down to the “that” being a random combination of buttons.
However! Animal Well’s items/upgrades are never a double jump or swimming shoes. They have novel uses behind their obvious one that excited me in a way I hadn’t in a while. “Oh wow I can do this now???”
The boss battles such as you can call them that are also inventive. Then there is the stuff in the game that is legitimately upsetting/scary. I was impressed with a Search Action game giving me all these emotions and exciting me to explore. It does this wordlessly, with incredible graphics and sound design. It feels like they chose the hard-path at every decision and this is apparently their first game and they developed it solo (yeah right.) the more I played it the more I went “Who The Fuck Made This??”
So not going to let my annoyance at the post game where you are expected to use EVERYTHING on EVERYWHERE get me down.
I think the puzzle that took cooperation of the internet is hilarious. That stuff owns.
That the dev said he wanted to make a singular object and release it and never touch it again because it belonged to the people but also encoded the source code so no one could data mine it. Well which is it buddy?
Almost certain it is in my top 10 of the year.
That you could easily complete it without being OCD is the highest compliment I can give it.
7 Likes
I am pretty impressed with the full depth of stuff hidden by watching youtube.
A lot of it is press this randomized button combination that you have to decode from unicode.
I think my take away after finishing is that this game has good level design and bad puzzles
Animal Well puzzles are either Square peg goes in the square hole, or Find the Correct Pixel out of Ten Million.
Maybe thats not true if you get into the ARG stuff, but thats how it felt going through the main game.
Exploring the map was engaging and rewarding, but solving the puzzles was mostly unsatisfying, either because they were extremely obvious or so hidden that it just felt like eventually stumbling into an answer.
This was probably exasperated by playing isles of sea and sky, a game with excellent puzzles and a very satisfying map to explore, which manages to accomplish everything I love about the experience metroid game without having a single twitch action challenge. Similarly having just played sylvielime I couldn’t help but think that the items here were a step back from that… more polished but less interesting. Thats videogames I guess.
I dont mean to sound down on it, I did enjoy my time trying to break every sequence with the bubble wand, but by the end of it I couldnt shake the evil nagging suspicion that the game was stuffed with secrets not for the player, but for the inevitable youtubers-react-top-10-animal-well-secrets-you-missed(you can pet number 9 
)
6 Likes
Looks like I got 2 games to try.
2 Likes
If I remember correctly from when we were talking about void stranger you don’t really like sokoban games, and isle of sea and sky is very much a sokoban game, so fair warning there, but between the two its much more accessible than void stranger at least (not that this is saying much, void stranger is for sickos, but I would say its generally pretty accessible as far as sokoban games go in general since you can pretty much always give up and go somewhere else if you dont like a puzzle)
1 Like