Animal Well is a really good game. The vibe is immaculate, the pixel art is stunning (dare I say the best looking pixel art game I've played?), and the overall dedication to the theming makes Animal Well a unique experience. The metroidvania-style gating and exploration driven gameplay are really engaging - and perhaps Animal Well's only real weakness is a bit of tedium in the fairly frequent backtracking that at times was a bit of a chore. A really clever and creative game that's well worth playing.

This is only like the seventh best LucasArts point-and-click, but it's also the third best Indiana Jones movie which absolves a lot of its sins. And sins it has: the percentage of obtuse puzzles is substantially higher than in, say, a Monkey Island; the combat is both boring and too densely packed (granted I accidentally selected the combat route, but this is even true in the route-independent Act III); and it requires a tremendous amount of slow traversal when you're trying to find the one pixel you didn't click on in the entire accessible game world.

But the writing and plotting are both fun, and it really does manage to capture that Indy spirit in the way the recent films absolutely didn't. The lack of Harrison Ford is pointedly felt, but everything else about it really does hit. It's also doing some interesting formal things: it has a few moments of genuinely inspired design, like the experience of feeling around in dark rooms while your eyes adjust, and its multi-route structure presages the team's later replayability strategies for Humongous Entertainment games. I'm quietly impressed, even if I don't actually want to play the game again.