Animal Well is a puzzle- and exploration-based metroidvania with a very cool 8-bit art style.
You play as a little blob creature that is stuck in an underground world filled with various kinds of animals. Mostly they ignore you, but the dogs will chase you unless you distract them, the crows will swoop you if you get too close, and so on.
As you explore the well, many rooms feature puzzles that need to be solved in order to proceed. These often involve pressing one or more buttons to open a door to a new area, and sometimes the buttons need to be pressed simultaneously. Animal Well is a metroidvania in the sense that progression is gated by earning new tools which you can use to solve more complex puzzles and platform to new areas. For example, one of the first tools you get is a slinky that can descend steps, and you quickly realize this can be used to trigger a button at the bottom. You also learn that tools often have multiple uses. For example, the disc (frisbee) is good for distracting dogs among other things.
Mystery abounds in Animal Well. There’s no lore and no dialogue, just animals that seem to have formed a makeshift civilization underground and you, a clever little blob, trying to make sense of it. Occasionally you’ll see a mysterious shrine or totem. What is it? Why is it there? In general, no clues will be given. The answer may be in an entirely different part of the map, and hopefully your brain makes the connection between the thing you wondered about hours ago and the new thing you are now presented with.
One of the chief mysteries is the eggs. As you explore, you will undoubtedly stumble upon a hidden nook, and inside will be a treasure chest. Opening the chest will reveal an egg with a unique name and pattern. There are actually 64 eggs tucked away in hard-to-reach spots around the map. You know this because, near to the start of the game, there’s an “egg room” where a large peacock watches over shelves where the eggs you discover gradually appear. There are spaces for 64 eggs. What happens when you find 8 or 32 or even all 64? There’s only one way to find out.
Animal Well is approximately 85% puzzles, 15% relatively easy platforming, and 0% combat. There are a handful of “bosses,” but these are defeated not by fighting but by puzzles or platforming challenges. For example, one boss chases you from one side of the map to the other, while you use your tools to navigate some tricky platforming at speed. Another chases you around 4 screens as you use different tools to trigger five buttons that open the door to escape. One of the pain points of the game for me was switching tools. That could be done either using the shoulder buttons (L and R on Switch) or from the inventory pop-up (X on Switch). The latter method pauses the game too, which is helpful for those boss sections. The clunkiness of switching tools was probably a consequence of the fact that there are (eventually) a few more tools than available buttons on a modern controller — but it did make me miss having abilities assigned to a single button like so many other games.
After 27 hours, I have beaten the final boss and collected all the eggs (with help from a guide to find the last 10 or so). And I know, from looking online, that there’s even more to do. Will I go back to get that 100%? Right now I’m not sure. I really enjoyed my time with Animal Well. It’s a game full of mystery and secrets. But if I’m honest, I was in it for the puzzling. Finding those last eggs was a bit tedious, and if I didn’t have the guide, I don’t know how long it would have taken me. What’s left of the game seems more on the tedious side, and I’m not sure I have the patience for that right now. So we’ll just have to see if I can leave the game’s remaining secrets at the bottom of the well — or if the mystery draws me back in sooner or later.