Game's cool. You play as Meatwad. It’s filled with smartly designed puzzles, making engaging use of an oddball toolset that rewards out-of-the-box thinking… but only so much. Beyond manoeuvrability skill checks that are satisfying enough to clear, and a few cool mechanical revelations, there wasn't a lot of head scratching here for me. Animal Well is tremendously well-accomplished for a solo project, I had a great time with it! It's just lacking a certain star power for it to really raise the bar.

For complete transparency, I had this game sold to me as an ‘Outer Wilds-like’ - and upon seeing that it was a sidescrolling metroidvania, I was beside myself with hope that I’d get a few notes of La-Mulana in Animal Well, too. In practice however, I think the more apt comparisons for Animal Well would be games like Environmental Station Alpha, Super Junkoid, A Monster's Expedition, or Knytt. The distinction is important, to me at the very least, because I approached Animal Well with pure intentions but spent most of my runtime hoping for an experience that never actually came. This isn’t a game about losing yourself in the sprawling tendrils of a world’s unfolding internal logic - Animal Well is an array of screens containing pressure plate puzzles. The world feels utilitarian, and even with the animal themed ruins that politely aim to conjure a sense of dread and mystery, it’s all misaligned and mismatched in a way that lacks the cohesion of a place with a history worth learning. The latter end of my runtime was characterised by backtracking through areas to collect the final few tools, but it was made excruciating by way of the fact that practically all of the screens merely become desolate roadways once you’ve solved their focal puzzles. I don’t think I spent any more than five minutes on any given puzzle in the first ‘layer’’ of the game, and for as much as I like how left-field the player toolset is, their interplay with the puzzles themselves is usually shockingly obvious and leaves very little room for doubt.

There is, undeniably, an inclusion of outtadisworld ARG-like puzzles that at the time of writing are still being unfolded by dedicated Animal Well researchers, but I’d be lying if I said I value things like that remotely as much as game content I can be trusted to learn and master on my own. Will the community uncover a secret back half of the game that turns the whole joint on its head Frog Fractions-style? I kind of doubt it lol. I’m a sicko that completed La-Mulana 2 on launch week before any guides were even written, the distinction here is that that series takes great pains to contextualise its puzzles in multiple ways - through cryptic hints and also through things like inferred historicity and synergy. Animal Well doesn’t do this, it scatters codes and event flags around the map in obscure nooks in the hopes that a friend group is putting together a Google Doc.

A quick aside;- Spent the past few weeks on a bit of an PS3 emulation kick, knocking out a few stragglers from the gen 8 library that always managed to elude me. One of the games I tried out was the 2012 SSX reboot nobody really likes - god knows why I chose to start my foray into this series with that entry, it was just kind of there I guess. It was alright! Hard to really fault what appears to be a rock solid racing foundation w/ incredible feedback & thrills. I managed to get surprisingly close to the end of the game before my motivation careened off a couloir with the insistence of an awful statistical equipment store, gimmick missions like the oxygen tank, glider, solar power & rear-view cameras. If only EA made no less than three games beforehand where this memetic & metric excess is absent!!

Anyway SSX 3 is fucking sick. Nothing short of a landmark achievement for this game to accomplish as much as it does way back in 2003, all the while fully maintaining this feeling of modernity that makes it absolutely breezy to pick up blindly in current year. Snowboarding controls iterated on to a mirror shine, mechanically dense & full of freedom of expression in how you can approach the shockingly sprawling slopes that spread their tendrils through a track like a spaghetti bowl. Repeated heats thru race courses would have patchnotes I swear, the more I familiarised myself with their layout the more they’d pull the rug out from under me to reveal new avenues and secret paths. I love the blisteringly fast risk reward & fuckup cascade that can happen when your antic hubris meets its match & your teeth meet the grind rail. I fully expected this to just control like a breezy Tony Hawk clone or something, but it's so bespoke to itself & intensely demanding in a way that I adored losing myself to the mastery of.

Perhaps unshocking, but it’s also striking to me how much better this game looks over the next-gen reboot lol. Feels as though the art designers had no say in the way SSX 2012 looked, rendering the majority of its slopes a very grey textureless mush that only came across as too scared to introduce visually interesting locales like the audience’s eyes would just burst like blueberries under the tropical sun or something. SSX 3’s mountain is lined up like a daisy chain of unique vignettes with key visual identities and senses of purpose in the macro. I adore how the lighting and skybox would change subtly as you progress down the mountain, so when you do the ultimate no loading screen downhill jam through every track you’ve familiarised yourself with it feels like such a perfect odyssey. Unlockable Adam Warren art is rly great, particularly adore the concept art of the courses themselves and how franco belgian they look lol. Eventually I’ll play Tricky and enter the heated internal angel & devil inside of me debate between which of these two entries I prefer. I DEEPLY want these games to be added to that Noclip.website so I can see how these tracks curl in on themselves.

ingame screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/cE30mYy.png

A joyous blissful hydrating nourishing follow-up to Rez, but I'm not the keenest sadly!! Child of Eden is a rly gorgeous example of that latestage Frutiger Aero Sharp Quattron Tech Advertisement aesthetiq, fully encompassed by Mizuguchi's spacey yoga house band, Genki Rockets. It's just a little loser of my own personal battle of appeals because none of this really hits my palate in the same way anything from Rez did. There's this lack of energy I can draw from Child of Eden - whereas Rez's thumping techno OST that blossoms in complexity across the span of a stage, alongside the Char Davies wireframe anthropology artstyle.... I just have a very clear fav, and Rez quite simply doesn't have the nerve to ask me to replay a stage with better scores to progress to the next one. Incredibly corp behaviour 🥲
Well worth a play/emulation for anyone who loves Rez though, there are like three games in this genre if i'm generous and Mizuguchi made most of them.