This review contains spoilers
I'm glad there's still room for games to have meaningful interaction without combat or shooting.
Animal Well iterates and in some places improves on the metroidvania genre.
The discovery and flow feels amazing, the items you get have multiple applications to how you navigate and interact with the world, causing a very un-gated playthrough where you're never feeling stuck despite zero quest markers or guidance.
This game is equally amazing at the puzzles it presents as much as its rich and eery atmosphere which is one of the most unique and quality things I've experienced as of late.
After that, well it was very cute of the developer to put the credits halfway through the game, there's secrets beyond secrets.
I found most of the eggs (60 of them) on my own, proceeded to complete the second ending which required figuring out a puzzle in binary code and playing a 64 long note song, and also found a couple of secret bunnies.
Beyond that I used the help of a guide since I didn't want to waste hours endlessly browsing the game for the slightest pixel changes.
Now these secret bunnies are ridiculous to find, and sometimes require you either notice a bar code in the grass blades, or literally own a printer, print out an origami, put it together and solve a puzzle. Or have 50 people stitch together a pixel art picture.
These bunnies lead to even more fun little secrets.
Then the community found wingding symbols which are only obtainable through extremely specific circumstances, like collecting a 100 health pickups without taking damage, aligned on a random picture in the game, they lead to another secret.
People might still find more things locked away, but even without that this is one of those rare experiences that will stay with me forever.
Animal Well iterates and in some places improves on the metroidvania genre.
The discovery and flow feels amazing, the items you get have multiple applications to how you navigate and interact with the world, causing a very un-gated playthrough where you're never feeling stuck despite zero quest markers or guidance.
This game is equally amazing at the puzzles it presents as much as its rich and eery atmosphere which is one of the most unique and quality things I've experienced as of late.
After that, well it was very cute of the developer to put the credits halfway through the game, there's secrets beyond secrets.
I found most of the eggs (60 of them) on my own, proceeded to complete the second ending which required figuring out a puzzle in binary code and playing a 64 long note song, and also found a couple of secret bunnies.
Beyond that I used the help of a guide since I didn't want to waste hours endlessly browsing the game for the slightest pixel changes.
Now these secret bunnies are ridiculous to find, and sometimes require you either notice a bar code in the grass blades, or literally own a printer, print out an origami, put it together and solve a puzzle. Or have 50 people stitch together a pixel art picture.
These bunnies lead to even more fun little secrets.
Then the community found wingding symbols which are only obtainable through extremely specific circumstances, like collecting a 100 health pickups without taking damage, aligned on a random picture in the game, they lead to another secret.
People might still find more things locked away, but even without that this is one of those rare experiences that will stay with me forever.