Seeing Animal Well getting so many perfect scores kind of put me on the offensive with it, and that's not fair. I should be looking at it in a vacuum, removed of comparisons to other Metroidvanias, and the opening gambit of a comedy YouTuber who had the gall to start his own publishing house. It's a game that invites scrutiny, but not on those criteria.

The core of Animal Well is its sense of physicality. There's a very grounded and well-supported sense of logic behind each puzzle and obstacle. There doesn't appear to be any attention given to lore or narrative (and if there is, it's hidden behind additional challenges in the post-game). Your player character is essentially a walking sprite tile, with little other defining features. You get a sense of how high they jump and how fast they move, and that's all you learn about them. As far as I can tell, they don't even have a name. The design's focus is on utility above all else. You gain an inventory of toys, and find out how they can be used in a range of different scenarios. Unlike a lot of games in the genre, your items don't feel like elaborate keys, only introduced to solve specific sets of puzzles, but useful tools that you'll need to experiment with to discover their full value.

The game's ruthlessly abstract, rarely giving any explanation of its ideas. You have to figure it all out through experimentation. It wraps itself up in neon pixels and ambient soundscapes, and you just pick away at it, slowly uncovering more of the map and gaining a deeper understanding of how to traverse it. I spent hours doddering around with puzzles before I realised what I was focusing on was optional post-game content, and discovered what my immediate objective was supposed to be. I have to go really far back to find other games that took such a hands-off approach. Like, 8-bit microcomputer far back. And none of those games could dream of approaching this level of complexity. The closest modern comparison I can think of is VVVVVV, and that's, what, fourteen years old now? I think you only get these games when one guy makes the whole thing himself, and spends an entire console generation tinkering around with ideas, reworking the entire thing each time some new mechanic has an unintended knock-on effect. When someone never has to get a team on-board with their logic, and can just play around with the esoteric ruleset that lives in their own head.

Animals appear to be the game's one constant theme, and I think it's probably just because the developer liked them and they're fun to draw. It doesn't appear to be making any statement about real-world animals, and they all appear in different scales with clashing art styles. Some are cartoony, some are realistic, some have complex logic and a wide range of movement, some are very constrained and function as part of the fundamental level design. They're just a soft face on an otherwise abstract gamepiece. They're not the point. It almost seems coincidental that so many of the things that the game's made up of are animals. Play this game for the experimental approach to Metroidvania design, and the ever-expanding depth. Don't play it because it has Animal in the name.

It's a good game, but it feels a little cold to me. Like they didn't want to give us something to love. I'm not saying it should have Kirby in it (not that I'd complain, but the suggestion would undermine the point I'm making), but a big part of what I love about Metroid is how cool Samus is, and how exciting it is to see her doing cool stuff. Animal Well can feel a little like playing with a desktoy or something. It's so barebones in its expression of character and worldbuilding, and that's not going to be a problem for a lot of people, but it makes me feel a little too detached from it. Again, I can try to appreciate it on its own merits, but it's my main complaint. Maybe it's childish, but I like being the cool hero on the big adventure. Metroid Dread makes this look like Minesweeper.

It was about time I owned this.

Is it a guilty pleasure? I don't know. I don't shy away from my affection for Aerosmith, despite the fact they are, undeniably, incredibly embarrassing. I'll blame the fact that I was introduced to their albums when I was very young, and my music tastes basically amounted to anything up-tempo that made reference to explosions. They seem like a weird band for kids to be into, but they've always courted young-skewing media, from The Simpsons to Wayne's World 2 to, most shockingly of all, Rugrats Go Wild. They've also been curiously videogame-positive, from Midway's rubbish lightgun shooter, Revolution X, to Quest for Fame, to the interactive minigame you got when you inserted the Nine Lives CD into a Windows 95 PC, and of course, the classic chatroom/immersive 3D MMO, Aerosmith World. Apparently, Steven Tyler's cousin, the ever-venerable Tommy Tallarico, served as a bit of a bridge between the band and Activision, resulting in this oddly early Aerosmith-themed version of Guitar Hero.

In the grand scheme of things, Guitar Hero was still fairly new at this point, hadn't really delved into DLC, and this was the first game in the series devoted to one artist. In retrospect, The Beatles Rock Band really is the gold standard for this stuff, and that's kind of an edge-case scenario with a media entity that's famously fussy about licensing-out their content (particularly in the pre-Spotify days). Aerosmith are the polar opposite. These games were still being made by original PS2 developer, RedOctane at this point, before the series was entirely handed to co-developer, Neversoft, and its vintage really shows. The primary focus is on playing through a band's career, moving to larger venues, and completing the story. There are extra songs that are purchasable with in-game "money" (not the real stuff that Activision would become so ruthlessly keen on in the following decade), and they're accessed via a separate menu because they're not canon, or something. You also have to select a classic generic Guitar Hero character to perform as, with all their cartoony animations. Don't worry. You'll still get to play as Aerosmith, but the Guitar Hero characters are here to play as a sort of opening act, weirdly playing non-Aerosmith songs. There's Joan Jett, Mott the Hoople and fucking Ted Nugent in this, and the career mode insists on you playing through those songs to progress. Back at this point, there was a patronising intent for Guitar Hero to introduce young audiences to "real music", and not just allow them to access songs they already liked. These other artists' songs are rarely the original recordings, and rather, covers by RedOctane's in-house bands, and they stick out quite bitterly to audiences accustomed to the standards of the more recent Rock Band titles.

I'm also reminded why I drew the line so definitively against Guitar Hero games when Rock Band first became a rival franchise. Rock Band immediately took more of a light sim approach, attempting to faithfully map guitar parts to a five-button game controller. Guitar Hero's charts have far more videogamey bullshit running through them, and the 3+ button "chords" you're faced with on Expert mode are Bad. Harmonix always had more credibility, and have remained hopelessly devoted to combining music and videogames in ambitious, wildly impractical ways, while Activision were more out of touch and cynical. I feel like I'm sacrificing much of my own values (read: prejudice) by turning this on.

The worst thing in the game is a misguided "Guitar battle" stage. I'm pretty sure these were in a couple other Guitar Hero games around this time, and they still hadn't learned their lesson by this point. Your Guitar Hero character and Joe Perry each play a phrase, unlocking Mario Kart-style power-ups for successfully playing a sequence. You activate these by engaging "Star Power" (holding your toy's neck vertically), and they're all really bad. If you get hit by one, you may need to press twice as many buttons, or get shifted up a difficulty level, or the most rubbish of all - rapidly jam on the whammy bar until you're allowed to play again. You might as well tell me I'm not allowed to play until I hop on one leg for ten seconds. It's definitely not the experience that anybody who bought this game wanted, and thankfully, it's just one level, but it's mandatory, and it's really fucking crap.

There are treats for the bigger Aero-heads in the audience. The band seems to have been heavily involved in the game's development, and even rerecorded a couple of early songs whose master tapes weren't suitable for use. Fair credit to them. They were still able to capture their 70s sound far into the 2000s, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell that they were recorded by the post-Just Push Play/Honkin' On Bobo version of the band. I'm especially giddy that the TERRIBLE Bright Light Fright somehow made the tracklist, as its lyrics have been a source of many in-jokes for me through my twenties. There's also mercifully few of the one-per-album ballads in here, with a focus on heavier rockers and big Joe Perry solos. They likely cut some of their potential sales by leaving Don't Want to Miss A Thing off this, but I'm very grateful for that. Why am I making out like I'm above this? I like Rag Doll. I like Sweet Emotion. I like Back in the Saddle. I'm the key demo, here. This game belongs on my shelves like a regrettable tattoo. For whatever you have to say about Aerosmith, they do have a back catalogue of big silly rock songs with wild guitar solos, and that pairs well with Guitar Hero. Ultimately, though, the thing I like most is that it costs £1 in CeX, and I paid that entirely with trade-in credit.