malvasia bianca

(If you’re super spoiler sensitive, then I guess there are spoilers here. If you’re only moderately spoiler sensitive then this post should be fine, I think.)

 

Animal Well is a platformer Metroidvania. And, I suspect, it’s a somewhat unusual one?

One way in which it’s unusual is that the abilities that you acquire are a little bit nonstandard. Instead of giving you a double jump, for example, you get a bubble wand which produces a bubble rising in the air that you can jump onto and then off of, and which has its own physics. None of the abilities feel bizarre or anything, they’re just capabilities that I’m not particularly used to seeing. (And that usually contain implications that aren’t obvious at the beginning.)

 

Another unusual aspect is the game’s attitude towards difficulty. Fairly early on (possibly before I had any non-starting abilities?) I fell down a two screen room with five columns of rising bubbles; because I get nervous when I don’t know how to backtrack, I tried hopping up the bubbles to the top. And that turned out to be surprisingly difficult!

Like I said above, bubbles in this game (whether produced from the environment or from your wand) have physics; so if you stand on a bubble for a while, it’ll start sinking, and kind of nudge other bubbles out of the way. (And, related to that, even though rooms are designed with a grid pattern, you and items like bubbles aren’t constrained to that grid, so the jumps are less regular than you might expect.) And that physics combined with the fact that bubbles pop when you jump off of them made it not nearly as easy as you’d think to jump up the columns all the way to the top of the screen; but the column of bubbles goes up two screens, and you don’t gradually scroll between the two parts of the columns, you go from being at the top of the bottom screen of the room with the columns to the bottom of the top half of the room. And then, if you don’t jump off your bubble immediately, you go right back down to the top of the lower screen.

So that whole setup was disorienting in a sort of casually offhanded way, like the game was telling me “sorry, this is the way it is, deal with it”. Or, alternatively, the game was telling me “don’t try to backtrack right now, just keep on going”. Which is what I did; but you do have to succeed at that puzzle eventually.

 

And the third surprising bit of the game was the freedom that it gives you to decide how to navigate the world. It wasn’t entirely obvious to me when I was playing through it how many choices I had as to where to go, but it did feel to me like there were other options in how to sequence things than the specific route I took. When I was done with the game, I listened to a podcast interview about it; if I’m remembering correctly, there are four major areas of the map, you can do them in any order, each of those areas is divided up into three sections, and it’s something like you get an item at the end of the first section, you need to show that you can use the item in the second section, and you need to use one of the items from a different area in order to progress through the third section?

I might have the details wrong there, but basically: you can do stuff in any order, but as you go deeper, it’ll start pushing back at you, and eventually it’ll force you to make some progress in a different area before finishing the area you started with. And, of course, there’s also the standard Metroidvania thing of stashing little secrets in various places: maybe gated by you not noticing the path to them, maybe gated by a skill check, maybe gated by an item you haven’t picked up. (But, unlike most Metroidvanias, those little secrets themselves aren’t powerups: your capabilities are gated by which major items you’ve acquired and the extent to which you know how to use them in the world, not by how much numbers have gone up.)

 

This all added up to a game that was pretty pleasant to explore. It didn’t take me too long to realize that I should annotate the map with signs showing secrets that I hadn’t unlocked and alternate routes that I hadn’t gone down; and there were a lot of those!

I settled into a nice rhythm of picking an area, trying to get to all the chests and flip all the switches that I could figure out how to do but not worrying to much if I couldn’t figure one out, I’d just add a question mark to the map. And then I’d go back to the central area, and pick a different direction. Eventually, I’d acquire an item that reminded me of some earlier bits that I’d seen before, so I’d go back to that earlier area and I’d make more progress.

Again, the standard Metroidvania thing, but I liked how Animal Well managed the rhythms: you weren’t just going back to get some isolated secrets, you were going back to be able to make progress. (With a side effect of also getting isolated secrets!)

 

Honestly, this carried me most of the way to the credits: the map shows four special points that you want to get to, I’d made it to three of them, and I’d made it almost to the end of the fourth one, and I had a couple of hypotheses about what to do to get that fourth one. Specifically, one of those hypotheses was “there’s some other item that I’m missing because I missed a path somewhere or noticed a path but couldn’t figure out how to go through it with my current tools”, and the other hypothesis was “this one specific item from earlier on in the game has a second use that I need here”. And the problem was that the first of those hypotheses would involve going all over the map yet again, whereas the second one of those felt like it would probably be a probably not very enjoyable skill check. And if I picked the wrong hypothesis (or if the right hypothesis was a third option I hadn’t thought of), then I’d spend an entire evening making zero progress, which would kind of suck.

So I looked it up; once I knew what to do, actually doing the correct thing was fine. And then, of course, that unlocked another area of the map.

That new area of the map I didn’t like. The difficulty level of the initial puzzles in that area would have been pleasant, but the game added in some mechanisms that simultaneously ratcheted up the stress level and meant I couldn’t pause at a screen and look around, plotting up my next move. This happened some in earlier parts of the game, but not very often or in a sustained manner; listening to that aforementioned podcast interview, the developer had intended there to be a horror aspect to the game, but it hadn’t really come out particularly strongly before to me? But it showed up in this new area; and once I made it past the initial bit of challenges, the game gave you an item that let you deal with that and then immediately added a new enemy that meant that you still couldn’t pause and stare at the screen to plot out what to do. Sigh.

 

This didn’t take me a super long time to go through or anything; maybe an hour for both parts, definitely not the whole evening. And then I made it to a final room and credits rolled; yay. After feeling in my previous session like I wanted to look up how to get that fourth flame, I’d decided in advance that this session was going to be my final session, so it was nice to have made it to credits. I had an hour left before going to bed, though, and people had told me about post-credits content; so I decided I’d spend the rest of the evening trying to explore that.

The problem was, I couldn’t quite jump out of the pit that the final room is in! After thinking about the problem, I decided that I could do it if I used the bubble wand to spawn a bubble right when I was jumping, to let me do infinite chains of jumps off of the ground; something I knew was possible but tricky, so it was a skill that I hadn’t gotten particularly good at. (The game intentionally hadn’t required that skill until then.) But that was hard, so after 15 minutes or so I said “I’d really rather be playing Yakuza 5” and I said farewell to Animal Well.

Poking around in guides after that, it turns out that, right before falling into that area, if you go through a different passage then you can (probably) reach a chest that gives you a different wand that makes multiple jumps much easier? Pretty weird choice to put that chest in a location where you can miss it right before you fall into a location where it would be really helpful; for me, switching over to Yakuza 5 when I did was definitely the right choice.

 

So I ended up with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth after the final couple of sessions. But, also, I was quite enjoying the game before then; I think it’s very well constructed in general, good puzzles at the micro level, good structure at the macro level, a pleasantly mysterious feeling to the environment.

And if you like games that have even more oblique mysteries, then apparently the post-credits content contains some of those that such folks have found worthwhile? Though the flip side is that, if you don’t like uncertainty or platforming challenges, you’ll probably give up before I did, and there’s a chance that you’ll get frustrated pretty early on. So certainly not the game for everybody, and even people who like it in general will probably find something that grates. But I’m certainly glad to have spent the time with it that I did.