Animal Well isn't the first game to be defined by their secret mechanics and hidden layers of puzzles. Fez paved the way, Outer Wilds built an entire game around it, Tunic mastered it, and Animal Well...

While I could call out a number of specific issues, they all stem from one core problem: it doesnt know the meaning of restraint. Each of Animal Well's ideas are really cool, and its biggest discoveries feel like a cosmic ephiphany, a sense of omniscience in discovering a new way to see the world. With each new item, and as you learn what the details of the world are telling you, the world seems entirely different.

But also, therein lies the problem. Compared to the examples I mentioned earlier - Fez, Outer Wilds, Tunic - Animal Well has several times more of these layers. It keeps going deeper and deeper and deeper, but without changing one key element: Getting around the world is a boring slog.

While you get a few new means of traversing the world, the game remains consistently annoying to navigate. Unlike the beautiful fluidity of Ori, or the stylish and precise Hollow Knight, theres nothing particularly fun about Animal Well's movement. This wasnt a problem when just trying to complete the main game up to the credits roll. But once you get deep into the endgame puzzles, each new discovery leads to you needing to retread the entire map to find every possible use for your new toy. While I initially enjoyed discovering and solving each new layer of puzzle, it eventually turned into a miserably tedious experience.

This is still a game I wholeheartedly recommend to most people. Even if follows a lineage of other puzzle games, Animal Well is still very much its own experience, with a completely unique aesthetic and atmosphere and novel structure and mechanics. But you have to decide when you've had enough. Getting too deep into the experience might eventually transform from a series of epiphanies into a miserable chore. So if you're a completionist, beware, because this may be a rabbit hole too deep to crawl out of.