Developer Shared Memory
Publisher Bigmode
Format PC (tested), PS5,
Switch Release Out now
Your journey begins inside a flower. Press a button and its petals unfurl, freeing your avatar – a squat little critter, just eight pixels high – to hop out and start exploring. It’s the perfect metaphor for the way a Metroid-like world traditionally reveals itself, spreading out in every direction. Yet it’s an imperfect one here. Were Animal Well’s opening a microcosm for the rest of the game, that flower would bloom swiftly, but within it would be another set of petals, this time somehow opening inward, revealing roots that extend farther into the soil than you could have imagined. To complete the metaphor, one of those petals would remain in place, stubbornly refusing to extend, yielding only to the most severe and persistent pressure.
This subterranean safari does not, in other words, play out like many of its putative peers. But then it doesn’t quite belong among them. In Japan, the so-called ‘Metroidvania’ doesn’t exist; instead, these games are labelled ‘search action’. While it’s unlikely Billy Basso considered that when he started developing Animal Well seven years ago, his game is far truer to that ideal than it is beholden to the tenets of that more common genre tag. Certainly when it comes to the ‘search’ part – a careful screen-by-screen charting of a relatively compact map, whose dimensions belie a setting of rare intricacy and density. Your progress through it is as much about excavation as exploration. There are still doors to unlock and barriers to remove, but it feels closer to tunnelling, deeper and farther, even before you gain an item that lets you dig beneath the surface in certain areas.
Like the other tools you gather, the function doesn’t necessarily match the form. Animal Well rejects the usual genre staples in favour of a child’s playthings, the first four acquired (not necessarily in this order) being a bubble wand, a flying disc, a yoyo and a helical spring. You won’t know what they do until you’ve tried them out, and you won’t really know what they can do without venturing deeper, since the environmental puzzles employ them in a number of different ways. The disc, for instance, can trigger distant switches, and is light enough that fans can influence its trajectory. The latter quality is, of course, also true of the bubbles, which form temporary platforms, letting you cross gaps too wide to jump. The yoyo’s string stretches up to hit outof-reach buttons, and around to the underside of ledges, though it can also smash through fragile obstructions – including pointed stalagmites, which would otherwise mean a painful landing. None of this is explained, but instinct and experimentation are consistently rewarded, and there are hidden techniques to discover besides.
At every turn, it manages to find unusual, some
