Idle Thoughts

Down the rabbit hole (★★★★☆)

Spoilers ahead!

Animal Well is part of a genre. I guess a “Fez-like” is a thing now. Or maybe a metroidbrainia, I’ve heard that somewhere. Whatever you want to call it, Animal Well is one of those, namely: a game that’s ostensibly a normal platformer, but that hides underneath the surface a second layer of much deeper puzzles. Like Tunic. Or Fez. (Spider is similar, now that I think about it) All of these seem to have some things in common. They’re the passionate creation of a solo developer. They use fairly simple cartoony graphics for budget reasons but also perhaps to lull the player with false sense of simplicity. However, I don’t think this time around there was much of a doubt that Animal Well was hiding something. Let’s get into it. It’s time to go down the titular Animal Well.

– Layer 1: this is the “normal”, surface-level game. You need to find four flames. There’s not much of a mystery to this, they’re even marked on the map. To reach them, you need to do the usual metroidvania stuff: find tools, open shortcuts and travel back and forth and use new tools to reach previously inaccessible areas. It’s worth noting here that the game has no combat to speak of. There’s health and enemies and bosses of a sort, but none of your tools are really weapons and you’re not killing anything. It wouldn’t be much of a game about a well filled with animals if you went and killed them all, now would it? What would PETA think? No, your tools are things like a slinky and a frisbee. Oops, I mean a slink and a flying disc, please don’t sue me.

As for the animals in the well, they all play a role. They’re a language in and of themselves, much in the same way that you learn what any object does in a puzzle game. Maybe you can push a crate one space over but a ball will roll to the opposite wall. That kind of stuff. In Animal Well, the chinchilla is a moving platform. A hummingbird in the room means this specific puzzle cannot be solved with bubbles. Squirrels are guideposts. The kangaroo is a psycho killer stalker. I really respect games like Inscryption and Animal Well that create a world out of real animals without resorting to fantasy mumbo-jumbo.

It also helps that the game has its very own unique atmosphere. Granted, the graphics are not particularly elaborate. The hero is a nondescript blob, probably the lowest-hanging fruit when choosing a main character. But Animal Well knows how to leverage the level of graphics it does have. The bigger animals are particularly impressive. Don’t tell me that the ghost cat “thing” won’t give you nightmares. The game uses dithering, light and smoke effects to good advantage. The color palette is dark purple, dark green, dark blue or just pure black and helps set the mood as mysterious. Seriously, what’s the deal with those scared rabbits peering at you from the title screen? What little music there is in Animal Well is haunting, maybe even forlorn. When there is no music, you can hear the gurgling of water, the grinding of distant machinery. A faraway clock in the distance chimes the hours. It resonates throughout the entire well. Playing Animal Well is like watching a late-night TV show for insomniacs. A show that lets you in the hidden world of animals.

– Layer 2: You’ve beaten the game. Or at least, you got the credits to run. Bravo! Then again, it’s basically impossible not to notice that there’s more to Animal Well. You’re no dummy. Besides, I wouldn’t do this whole shtick if there was only one layer to the game. Enter the eggs, dozens of them to collect. Animal Well doesn’t hide its second layer at all. In fact, you can find your first egg by going left instead of right at the start of the game. But even after solving the first layer, you probably still have lots of eggs to find. Now the real Animal Well begins. The egg hunt begins.

It’s time to pore over the map to find gaps that indicate undiscovered areas. It’s time to complete those optional puzzles you kept for later, those that really tax your understanding of the mechanics. More than this, it’s time to figure out some entirely new uses for your tools that are not obvious at first glance. It’s worth pointing out that some trophies pop when you figure out a hidden mechanic for the first time. “Maybe I could use this tool like this… oh, it works! And a trophy too? I’m a genius!” That’s a really clever use of trophies: not rewarding a specific accomplishment, but acknowledging that the player has acquired insight. It’s like a little cherry on top of your eureka moment.

Even more important, it’s time to reach some of the locked areas and discover whole new zones with new animals and brand new tools. You see, the inventory screen has been lying to you all along: there’s a whole other layer of items to find. This is easily the best reveal of the game. These new tools are mandatory to obtain all the eggs. Some also have secondary features that help you locate the eggs in the first place.

Because, yeah, have fun finding every single egg in the game. I mean that sentence in both the earnest sense and in a sarcastic sense. I’m saying this because it’s fun tying up loose ends. Heck, I even went whole hog and used map markers diligently. But as the leads get fewer and fewer, it does get pretty tiresome. It’s not the kind of game that lets you through the VIP door with 90% of the gimmicks collected. It’s all or nothing, buddy. And those last few eggs are going to take you more time to find than all the others combined. The game has dozens of pieces of shrub five pixels high that are actually a secret passage. It turned out I missed a few. So I gave up.

Clearly, that’s as far as I deserve to go. I know the measure of my worth. I had to look up the rest of the… wait there’s more?

– Layer 3: Now we’re in deep. Solving the second layer reveals a whole new aspect of the game world. Yup, there’s another layer of “items” to collect. You are shown one of those “items” at the start of the game, dangling just out of reach. You can probably find 1 or 2 on your own without too much trouble. Finding them all, however, is ridiculously hard. In fact, because of the way some hints are structured, it is literally impossible to solve one puzzle on your own. Plus, because of their design, I think a few of those puzzles aren’t really functional on console either.

Now I suppose I’m no longer qualified to pass comment on this layer. This is for ARG enthusiasts. If you don’t know what that stands for, you are out of your league. Almost all I know about this layer is from reading guides. But let me have a stab at it anyway. I do have immense respect for what was created here.

At this depth, the puzzles in games like these usually tend to have some common design features. Some seemingly innocuous decor elements will turn out to be a coded message that indicates controller inputs. There’s bound to be binary in there somewhere. A made-up language you have to painstakingly translate is usually de rigueur. There’s a high likelihood programming language is going to be involved (crap, I should have learned to code). God forbid, you’re actually going to have to recreate a song by ear (I’m not much of a musician either). This shit is nerdy even by nerdy nerd standards. But I do admire the sheer tenacity of players.

What Animal Well add to the mix is red herrings for people that look up the game’s code or otherwise try to hack or glitch the game. Finding one of these fake items, which shouldn’t happen normally, will permanently block you out of the solution. Those items can only be accessed through cheating or glitches, so the joke’s on you, I guess.

It’s quite fascinating, really. When you’re designing a puzzle for the big leagues, you can’t just put it in the game and let players have a go at it. You also need to figure out tricks to deter cheaters and those who would seek the easy way out. I assume looking up the code can be a lot of work in its own way, it’s just not the intended solution.

Now I’d like to get back to the fact that this layer is literally impossible to solve on your own. That’s kind of mean, to be honest. Is it good design? It goes without saying that a game about deep mysteries shouldn’t explicitly tell you what they are and how to solve them. But it just makes it all the more frustrating to leave those puzzles dangling, no?

In a sense, this layer was only for those players who got the game at release and collaborated together. Even if you wanted to try it on your own, as I said, not possible. Even if you tried to recreate the experience of a community coming together to solve the game… what are you going to do, find 100 people and make them swear in an affidavit that they won’t look up a guide?

Nah, if you were not part of the select few, this layer might as well not be part of your copy of the game. Well, technically, the game is exactly the same, but some ineffable quality is gone. It’s like those armchair treasure hunt books like Masquerade after someone’s already found the treasure. What are you going to do, dig up random patches of dirt in Wales without looking up if someone has already found the golden doubloon or whatever? You can still appreciate the effort that went into creating the puzzle and the effort that went into solving it, but it’s not quite the same, is it?

But I suppose this is all beyond the point. The vast majority of players probably won’t reach this layer and those that do will just look up a guide. Even the trophies/achievements don’t expect you to solve this layer. You can appreciate something without it being “for you”. Trust me, even reading about the details of the puzzles and their solutions can be fascinating.

Ah, that’s nice, what a beautiful way to end this review on a positive note… wait, what?

– Layer 4: Oh boy.There’s still more to the game. Now we’re deeper than deep. There are zero hints given as to the existence of this layer. The “items” to collect this time aren’t collectible in the usual sense of the word either. They’re more like snippets of a code. To get them, you basically have to do some very specific, but completely nonsensical actions. Supposedly, those actions are tied to “annoying” the animals, but it’s all so random it barely feels like a puzzle at all. Why does [REDACTED] give a code and not, say, jumping in the air a thousand times or riding a chinchilla for an hour? Who knows? To be fair, the developer himself didn’t really intend for this puzzle to be solved or even really discovered. So I guess it was intended more as a developer inside joke than as an Easter egg or an actual fourth layer. That means it’s okay if it remains forever unsolved.

That being said, it ended up being solved in just two months. Good job nerds.

Outro

That’s not even everything that’s in the game. There’s a bunch of “off-layer” things to collect: little animal figurines tied to other in-game achievements. Some of them have cryptic requirements in their own right. Most of them are tied to speedrunning the game. Like all speedrunning, beating Animal Well quickly relies on streamlining, sequence-breaking and even exploiting bugs outright. You will not be surprised that this rabbit hole goes deep in Animal Well too. There were also separate ARG puzzles tied to the release of the game. The cryptic site haseverythinginanimalwellbeenfoundyet hints that there’s still more secrets to be unearthed.

All in all, Animal Well is extremely impressive. Need I remind you that this is a solo-dev project, made over the course of seven years? Working alone for seven years is not much of an accomplishment, though, it’s finding the drive to keep working and ending up with a finished product like this that’s impressive. Did I mention the game runs on its own engine made from scratch and that the whole thing is 147Mb? Gosh, most AAA games can’t make a single cutscene with 147Mb. The fact that the game has four layers is itself remarkable. Most games of this type only have two: the apparent game and the “hidden” one. That the four layers have distinct levels of complexity is even more remarkable.

That being said, gushing about the craft that went into creating and solving the puzzles is nice and all, but what would have made me like the game even more? For one, I’d finally like an onion layer game whose second layer can be solved without absurd amounts of patience. Tunic wasn’t really much better in that regard. I’d appreciate it if the difference between the layers was clearer, especially between layers 2 and 3 and red herrings. It doesn’t feel great to bang your head trying to reach a chest only to realize that it’s irrelevant to what you’re trying to do and where the solution is waay more complicated than expected and cannot be found without a tool external to the game. More subtle hints could be given about what layer you’re “on”. Maybe the shape of the chests could give you a hint and where the more secret stuff isn’t in a chest at all.  The game does do this to an extent: the chests usually belong to layers 1 and 2… except when they don’t. Psych!

On the other hand, isn’t the whole point of an onion layer game that its layers are hidden? So I’m a bit conflicted. I’m okay with a game being for a select few. Still, it feels like there’s a delicate balance here between making a classic platformer and an ARG mystery-fest, especially if you’re hiding one inside the other.