I was a little less blown away by this than some of you, but it's undeniable that Billy Basso cooked with this. Very few elevator pitches can sell me as well as: you're a funky lil guinea pig mushroom dude and you get dropped in a subterranean pit of fucking nightmares and we won't tell you what to do or where to go. And so from the off, I was in, but I think what makes Animal Well grab you is that it doesn't try to hone in on being some masterful platformer or ballbusting puzzle game. It's not particularly complex or obtuse outside of a few puzzles that leave you stumped for a few minutes.

What it's honing in on is chucking you into a world that feels like you're actively discovering it, like early in the game when you decide to pick up a neat frisbee you stumble across and the spirit of fucking Anubis rises from the grave to smite you until you give it back. You begin putting things together because you're naturally uncovering what you're supposed to be doing and how you're supposed to be doing it, and look at that, you did it without the magical map from Dora the Explorer appearing in the top-right-hand corner of your HUD and saying "hello, you should do this next. You have no agency. I am your god now." Getting attacked by the towering ghost of a demonic god cat definitely just seems like a funny, 'keep your hands to yourself' jump scare, until four hours later, your brain clicks and you realise it's actually a fundamental part of the mysterious goal you've been unknowingly pursuing this whole time.

And when you add that to the fact that Basso has made such an aesthetically and thematically haunting world; which is phenomenal by the way. Just this absolutely harrowing nightmare realm that feels like it was torn from the mind of a seven-year-old child having a night terror after watching one of those old-ass, straight-to-TV Alice in Wonderland live-action specials; the whole thing somehow transforms into a really unsettling slice of atmospheric horror, a terrific metroidvania, and a nigh-on impossible to put down adventure into an unknown world all at the same time. And it was all made by one dude. It's actually filthy how talented some people are. Big Billy's out here making full-on games and the only gift I got is I can recite pretty much every line of dialogue from Spy Kids 2.