Animal Well, the mesmerizing debut from solo developer Billy Basso, is a game that defies easy categorization. A metroidvania-puzzle-platformer hybrid that explores the surreal subconscious, it draws the player inexorably into its bizarre, beautiful underworld. Like a half-remembered dream, Animal Well lingers in the mind long after the final credits roll, its striking imagery and cryptic mysteries burrowing into your psyche.
You play as a lone blob dropped into a vast subterranean realm, a labyrinth filled with remnants of long-lost civilizations and inhabited by strange creatures. Flamingos with an aura of unease. Killer ostriches and spectral cats. Hedgehogs with glowing eyes lurking in the shadows. This is a world where the ordinary and extraordinary collide, where childlike wonder mingles with a deepening sense of dread the further you delve.
At first glance, Animal Well's lo-fi pixel art style evokes 16-bit classics like Super Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. But spend mere moments navigating its caverns, and it quickly becomes apparent that there's something more avant-garde, even unsettling, pulsing beneath the surface.
Lush, vivid colors bring the environments to life. Phosphorescent plants and fungi cast an ethereal glow, staining rocky walls in psychedelic pinks, purples, and greens. Waterfalls cascade into luminous ponds, the water rippling hypnotically. But there's a dissonance to the beauty, a sense that some malevolent intelligence permeates these spaces. It's in the alien architectures - the bizarre shrines and statues depicting the denizens of this realm. In the ominous thrum of the synth soundtrack punctuating the eerie stillness. In the feeling of being watched by unseen eyes.
As you guide your amorphous avatar through this phantasmagoric landscape, the atmosphere thickens, seeping into your bones. The 2D side-scrolling perspective, rather than feeling limited, heightens the claustrophobia, the sense of being hemmed in by forces beyond your comprehension. The control scheme is elegantly simple - much of the challenge comes from deciphering the function and purpose of the various tools you stumble across in your wanderings.
A slinky becomes an impromptu switch to activate distant platforms. Bubbles blown from a wand act as ephemeral elevators to ascend to out-of-reach ledges. A frisbee serves as both traversal device and a force field against malign ghosts. But Animal Well delights in subverting your assumptions. Just when you think you've mastered an item's utility, the game finds a devious new way to recontextualize it. Solutions require not just lateral thinking but a complete perspective shift, an Alice-through-the-looking-glass tumble into non-Euclidean dream-logic.
This capricious approach to puzzle design reaches its apex in Animal Well's now infamous community-stumping enigmas. Arcane hieroglyphics tease some greater mystery, hinting at a larger narrative, but the game steadfastly withholds any easy answers. In interviews, Basso has likened the experience to "falling asleep with a podcast on in the background" - you catch snippets of an overarching plot in snatches of environmental storytelling, but your understanding is always fragmentary, just out of reach. It's a bold gambit, especially coming from a first-time developer, but one that pays off in spades. The sense of being an archeologist of the subconscious, sifting through the symbolic detritus of the game's world for glimmers of meaning, is genuinely thrilling.
Not all the opacity works in the game's favor, however. The lack of a map - or any navigational aids at all in the opening hours - can lead to frustrating, aimless wandering until you get your bearings. A few of the more convoluted late-game puzzles veer from satisfyingly brain-teasing to straight-up obtuse. And while the scattered approach to lore and worldbuilding is undeniably evocative, some might be left craving just a bit more context, a few more concrete handholds to grasp onto as they scale the game's metaphorical walls.
But these are minor quibbles when stacked against the wholly unique experience Animal Well conjures. In an industry all too often content to polish comfortable, profitable formulas to a high gleam, it's a game that feels genuinely new - even revolutionary. By plunging us into the depths of a surrealist wonderland and letting us find our own path, Basso and company have crafted something that burrows deep into the brain and refuses to let go.
There's a sequence midway through the game that encapsulates Animal Well's single-minded commitment to marrying mechanics and mystery to emotionally devastating effect. After squeezing your gelatinous form through a series of seemingly impassable crevices, you emerge into a cavernous temple, dominated by an enormous statue resembling a chimeric fusion of flamingo, frog, and insect. As you approach the altar, spectral figures flicker at the edges of your vision, there and gone when you whip around for a better look.
Tense, discordant chords crescendo from the soundtrack as you activate an elaborate mechanism, causing the statue's iridescent eyes to flare with eldritch light. The floor crumbles beneath you, sending you plummeting into an abyss that opens up into a miles-long shaft descending through the bedrock, down into some abyssal darkness. Your blob's boneless body flattens and stretches from the sheer g-forces, the rushing wind whipping psychedelic rock formations into a blur.
And just when you think you've gathered your bearings, a pair of enormous eyes blink open from the shadows beneath you, slitted pupils fixing you with a gaze of hunger and horrible intelligence. A flurry of pink feathers explodes in your peripheral vision as the beast unfurls mile-wide wings, and you realize with dawning terror that you've awoken some ancient god - or demon - that's been slumbering in the depths since time immemorial.
The next several minutes are a frantic, adrenaline-fueled plunge as you dash out of the way of snapping jaws and grasping talons the size of buildings, bubbles and frisbees your only feeble defense against this force of primeval nature. Dynamic camera angles heighten the sense of disorienting, vertiginous movement. The music shrieks and booms. Onscreen prompts flash cryptic warnings that could be hallucinations conjured by your stress-addled brain. This exhilarating and terrifying moment sears itself into your synapses, a gaming experience few can match.
Animal Well is punctuated by these awe-inspiring set-piece encounters, each one ratcheting up the stakes and constantly pushing at the boundaries of what you thought the game was capable of. In one bravura later section, you're tasked with infiltrating the over-the-top fortress of the marauding Ostrich King, an imposing figure decked out in pilfered relics like some avian Ozymandias lording over the crumbling wonders of lost empires. Menacing sentry guns and lethal, chomping chain-chomps patrol the gilded halls as you sneak through the ducts like a globular John McClane, witnessing the paranoid king arguing with his subordinates and slowly growing more unhinged. The whole thing plays out as a jet-black comedy of dictatorial hubris, building to a satisfyingly silly boss fight involving, among other things, winding up an oversized tin soldier and watching it pratfall into the king repeatedly.
There's an undercurrent of melancholy threaded through Animal Well's hijinks, though. The deeper you venture, the more obvious it becomes that some terrible tragedy befell this place, snuffing out a vibrant civilization and leaving behind only forsaken ruins and the maddened creatures that haunt them. You'll stumble across dioramas depicting lush forests and thriving cities, specters of a verdant world before...well, before whatever it was that transformed it into this eerie, haunted-house mirror version of itself. The flamingos clustered around a makeshift nest cobbled together from scavenged detritus, panic in their eyes as they try to protect their egg from the encroaching shadows. The school of fish forever frozen in a frenzied loop, as if they sense some looming, unspeakable threat. Even the Ostrich King's madcap antics take on a certain pathos when you realize he's just play-acting at authority, desperately trying to assert some sense of control as society crumbles around him.
In its uncompromising oddness and carefully cultivated sense of mystery, Animal Well calls to mind the enigmatic other worlds of Hidetaka Miyazaki's games. But where the Souls series and Elden Ring cloak their lore in a few degrees of abstraction, Animal Well turns the obfuscation up to 11, leaving you grasping to stitch a coherent narrative out of the barest scraps.
It can be a frustrating experience for those craving a more explicit story, but there's something deeply resonant about Animal Well's approach. It feels true to how memory really works - not as an orderly filing system where every event slots neatly into place, but as a jumble of associations, correspondences, and dream-symbols that resolve into something approaching meaning only with distance and careful excavation. The game is less concerned with relaying a Wikipedia plot summary than conjuring an atmosphere, a mood, a self-contained universe that operates according to its own alien logic. It's a Lynchian fever dream filtered through the lens of Lewis Carroll, a journey into the uncharted territory of the unconscious mind.
And what a trip it is. Each new area brings fresh wonders and horrors, the environments growing more surreal and mind-bending the deeper you go. One of the game's most jaw-dropping tricks is how radically it reinvents itself from one screen to the next, while still maintaining a cohesive identity. You'll wade through hive-like honeycombs the size of cathedrals, royal jelly glistening amber on the walls, fat grubs wriggling in the dark. Rusted theme park attractions spring to eerie half-life as you approach, calliope music echoing from nowhere. A dilapidated subway tunnel opens up into an abstract space where M.C. Escher tessellations rotate in all directions at once. It's dizzying. Disorienting. Thrilling.
Holding it all together is the intuitive, physics-based logic at the heart of the puzzles and platforming challenges. The various gadgets and gizmos you collect behave exactly how you'd expect them to in the real world, making it easy to suss out their applications through hands-on experimentation. Catapulting yourself across chasms with a comically oversized rubber band looks and feels like snapping an errant office supply, down to the slight wobble as the elasticity kicks in. The yo-yo's pendulum momentum makes grabbing out-of-reach items second nature. Even the most esoteric of Animal Well's contraptions operates according to rules that quickly become second nature, allowing you to lose yourself in the tactile pleasure of poking and prodding at its systems.
Which brings us back to the blob. Your gelatinous protagonist is a masterclass in character design, a squishily expressive avatar that could be a descendant of Q*bert or one of Miyamoto's beloved oddballs. Despite being little more than a quivering mound of goo, the blob exudes personality from every wobble and stretch. The way it goes stock still in the presence of danger, like a spooked deer. How it lets out an empathetic little shiver passing over a ledge. Even in its idling animation, you get a clear sense of the creature's thoughts and feelings, curiosity and trepidation in a precarious balance.
That Animal Well manages this level of characterization without a single line of dialogue or even a proper face is a minor miracle. It's indicative of the game's knack for wordless storytelling, for setting up little dioramas that spark the imagination and invite speculation. Why do the crabs scuttle in such intricate, ritualistic patterns around the ruins of their cliffside civilization? What's the meaning behind the cat statues' sly, secret-hoarding grins? Do the hedgehogs' sussurating whispers contain the key to decoding the game's entire cosmology, if only you could parse their prickly, alien tongue?
These questions linger like fragments of a dream upon waking, hinting at some deeper meaning dancing just out of reach. In that sense, finishing Animal Well isn't really finishing at all - it's the beginning of turning it over and over in your mind, of discussing and debating it with fellow players, of plunging back in to wring new secrets from its eldritch depths. It's a game that demands to be inhabited, lost in, returned to again and again.
Part of the joy comes from happening upon some hidden interaction or chain reaction that completely changes how you think about a creature, object, or environment. Poke the right mushroom and a flock of luminous jellies erupt from the cap, lighting your way through the gloom. Play a garbled tune on a sunken piano and a school of skeletal fish assemble into a makeshift bridge above a bubbling tar pit. Stick around the hedgehog den during a particular phase of the cavern's impossible moon, and you'll witness the spiny critters gather for an otherworldly midnight shindig straight out of a Brian Froud illustration.
The other part comes from piecing together your interpretation of events with other Animal Well obsessives online. Because the lore is so fragmentary and open to interpretation, swapping theories with the community becomes its own meta-puzzle, its own brain-teasing descent into the game's nebulous depths. Lengthy forum threads dissect hedge maze layouts like arcane star charts. Reddit detectives assemble virtual corkboards linking far-flung statues to long-lost civilizations. Feuds erupt over what, exactly, the significance of the number 11 recurring throughout the game could possibly mean. It's a communal act of creation, one that will likely only grow richer and more elaborate as the months and years wear on.
This, ultimately, is Animal Well's masterstroke. By refusing to fill in all the blanks, to provide a codex cataloguing every creature and a glossary defining every scrap of occult terminology, it transforms its players into storytellers. We become the archaeologists piecing together the ruins of something grander, the scholars debating the ethics of the flamingo empire, the digital campfire swappers breathing life into its mythology one whispered theory at a time. In gifting us a world as dense with implication as it is sparse on concrete answers, Basso and company invite us to continue dreaming Animal Well into existence, long after the credits roll.
It feels fitting that the game's "ending," such as it is, provides no closure in the traditional sense. Your final descent only raises more questions, recontextualizes everything that's come before in a way destined to fuel a thousand more Reddit threads. New doors open and new caves beckon, ethereal architectures glinting in the gloom like half-remembered sculptures. It's clear, as you squeeze and squelch through the fleshy folds separating one reality from the next, that you're crossing a threshold into uncharted territory, a place of pure dream-logic where easy answers dissolve like ink in water.
The screen goes blank. The credits roll. Shapes flicker in your peripheral vision like specters of the subterranean denizens you've spent the last dozen hours studying, fighting, befriending. Your fingers itch to pick up the controller and plunge back in, to seek clarity in the roiling chaos. But the more you grasp for easy explanations, the more they slip from your fingers like the silken edges of a nightmare shredding in morning light.
The only solution is to make peace with the mystery. To accept Animal Well as a journey that can't be fully deciphered, only experienced. Sinking into its depths, you cede control, allow its dream currents to whisk you along according to their own whims. It's not a game to be beaten or broken down into guide-ready steps - it's a secret self-contained universe to be lost in, and in so doing, to lose yourself in turn. Like any great fairy tale or myth, its power is in its ambiguity, the way it works on you in ways that defy literal-minded analysis. Reducing it to a rote hero's journey or a simple twist would be missing the forest for the trees - or the glowing caverns for their clammy walls.
Since rolling credits, I've returned to Animal Well's labyrinthine underworld a dozen times or more, sometimes for minutes, other times for hours that melt into bleary-eyed mornings. Each time I do, it greets me like an old friend - albeit one whose face shifts and shimmers the harder you try to pin it down. Familiar sights have a way of rearranging themselves when I'm not looking.
Corridors snake in impossible new directions. Creatures croak and click just out of sight, as if amused by my returned presence. But I no longer plumb its depths looking for answers, straining to scratch some phantom itch of a completionist streak. I come to bask in its fathomless mystery, to lose myself in a space that resists easy mapping.
Animal Well invites you to give up the ghost, to submit to its churning subterranean logic and let it carry you like a leaf on a dream-stream to shores unknown. Stop fighting the current and let its eerie beauty wash over you. Stroke by gentle stroke, it will bear you through the twisting passageways of its heart, whispering secrets in a language that bypasses the conscious mind. And though you may emerge with no clear answers, the ghost of its sublime strangeness will linger, the grit of its impossible sands stuck beneath your nails.
In the end, Animal Well is less a game to be played than a place to be dreamed. A singularly transportive experience that wedges itself in the neglected crawlspaces of your mind and soul, laying its alien eggs. To play it is to nurture a secret the waking world can never fully understand - a shifting, shimmering notion of life's bottomless mystery. Its greatest treasure isn't the trove of secrets waiting at the bottom of its impossible ocean, but the change it works on you in the searching, the doors of perception it opens. The real final boss is your own stubborn desire for certainty in the face of the transcendently unknown.
Triumph over that, and Animal Well's true ending becomes clear. Not a post-credits stinger or buried lore entry, but a lingering sense of its presence in your mind - the ghostly afterimage of its neon-limned caverns burned forever on your brain's backside. The game doesn't stop when you set the controller down. That's simply when it begins its second life, unfolding on the infinite canvasses of imagination. Whisper its name and the labyrinth twists to life again in memory's depths, its horrors and wonders undimmed by time or distance. Animal Well is always waiting at the edges of thought, a half-dreamed passageway leading out of the prison of the self and into enigma's fathomless depths.
To put it another way: when the credits roll, Animal Well gives you a choice. You can wake up into the gray light of explanations and walkthroughs, or you can burrow back down into the dream, slip into the stream, and see where it takes you. In making that choice, you learn something indelible about yourself, some secret that resists articulation. Until at last the line between game and self dissolves, and you take your place among the cave's eccentric pantheon, another blinking eye in its teeming dark.
Animal Well will not be for everyone. Its mystifying opacity will undoubtedly frustrate as many as it captivates. Those craving a more conventional, guided experience may come away resentful of its steadfast refusal to show its whole hand. But for a certain strand of player - the dreamers, the spelunkers of the subconscious, the scholars of the secret strange - it will be nothing short of a revelation. In its uncompromising specificity and pure-cut alienness, it captures something unnamable about the weird wonder at the heart of games, and art, and being. Something that can only be hinted at, brushed up against, but never pinned and mounted. Its magic is the magic of mystery itself - the knowledge that the universe will never fit in our head, and the joy of chasing it anyway.
So go. Descend. Lose yourself in the labyrinth. Gather the stories it spins in its hidden depths. Hoard them like pearls. There are sights down there that defy description, visions that will thrill and perplex and dazzle you in equal measure. Sift the silt for its secrets, and know the search will leave you changed. Just don't expect to come back with a map. The only compass you need is your own capacity for awe, your willingness to chase the inexplicable beyond the edges of the possible. The rest will attend to itself.
And if you see a strange light shimmering at the edges of your vision, a flicker-flicker-flash of insight dancing just out of reach? Don't be afraid to follow it into the dark. Animal Well will be there waiting, its endlessly looping mysteries embracing you like a second skin. This is the real treasure. This is the final secret, the only one that matters. Forget the Wiki entries and the theory-mongering. In the end, there's only the fall, the dream, the dark. And the choice to come back, again and again, and see it all anew.