Animal Well (PS5) Review – How Deep Does This Well Go?

Metroidvanias are one of the few genres that I strive to play above all others. The joy of discovering a new ability and trying it out everywhere across the map to discover hidden pathways never fails to bring a smile to my face. In Animal Well, a solo project by one Billy Basso and published by Bigmode, the combat is instead replaced with creative ways to use all of the tools in hand. This was a title I had gotten hands-on with at various media events over the past couple of years, and every time, I found myself drawn back into the simple appearance, hiding oh so many secrets.

Animal Well opens with a weird little guy waking up from a quiet slumber and seemingly trapped within the well with no way out. The only options available to the player are walking from side to side or jumping. The first ‘upgrade’ that players discover through regular play are firecrackers, which serve to either illuminate a room or toss at ghosts to scare them off for a brief time, permitting the player time to activate a lever or navigate a short jumping puzzle without dying instantly to their touch. Later on, players can find hidden matches and pair them with conspicuously placed candles to keep the room permanently illuminated and ghost-free. Eagle-eyed players might even find their first match before stumbling across the first candle (something that I missed until close to the end of the game and was similarly overlooked by other reviewers I had the opportunity to discuss Animal Well with prior to launch).

Once making it through the tutorial area, players are greeted with four ominous statues of beasts, each guarding a spot designed to hold a flame. In Animal Well, where there is no dialogue or spoken word, players are given bits and pieces to the story while this is one of the rare instances where the end goal is explicitly provided to the player. Upon reaching that central area with the four braziers, players can freely explore and try to tackle the world as they see fit and obtain the four flames in any order, provided they have the tools to do so.

There isn’t any one correct way to explore the world of Animal Well, although roadblocks will immediately present themselves to the player if they haven’t acquired a specific tool. Venturing off to the east leads to a brick wall nearly double the height of the player’s jump. Naturally, one would think there’s a double jump upgrade to get up onto that ledge. Each upgrade the player acquires doesn’t directly correlate with the powers one would typically see in a Metroid title but instead brings a different dynamic to the gameplay. Rather than getting the ability to jump in the air, players will discover a bubble wand that can create a temporary platform they can hop onto for a bit of extra height.

For such a tiny pixelated world, Animal Well is overflowing with secrets. Merely acquiring a new upgrade tool opens the floodgates of possibilities for exploration. As players explore the depths of the well, one of the recurring collectibles to discover comes by way of eggs, of which there are 64 in total to collect. Collecting certain thresholds of eggs rewards the player with various new tools, including the ability to leave hint stamps or draw lines on the in-game map. If it weren’t for these tools, I probably would have been at a loss for some of these eggs where I could see something clearly amiss in the room that I didn’t have the correct tool for at the time. By the time I rolled credits on Animal Well, my map and desk of sticky notes were a mess of checklists, charted pathways, and reminders of where I might have seen a candle but didn’t have a spare candle at the time. As Roald Dahl once said, ‘watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places’.

Something that I didn’t expect to see in Animal Well was how global illumination literally lights up the world. While the entirety of Animal Well is drawn by pixels, things like the flashing of a firecracker or wispy smoke can draw across the pixels and light them up independently. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a fascinating bit of tech that I wouldn’t have expected to see in a pixel platformer, and while it’s certainly not the best-looking lighting, the way the world evolves with the addition of light is such an intriguing concept to me.

Animal Well fascinated me from start to finish and journeying into the well completely blind certainly took me somewhere in the realm of twenty to thirty hours to feel like I had seen all there is. Players that have some hints of the general flow and exploration of Animal Well could certainly finish it in closer to six to ten hours, something that puts it in line with your typical Metroidvania title, while speedrunners can probably shave off half without too much trouble. But the real joys of Animal Well are taking that time to just stop, take a moment to explore and admire the pixelated scenery, and perhaps discover a secret or two along the way. For the first title published by YouTuber videogamedunkey’s publishing label Bigmode, they couldn’t have picked a finer inaugural entry than Billy Basso’s Animal Well.

Reviewed on PlayStation 5 (code provided by the studio).

Animal Well

Animal Well is a fantastic breakout title from both a new developer and publishing studio. Fans of Fez and Tunic will feel right at home jumping into this well.