Animal Well Review: Retro & Glorious

Main Review - by James

In an ideal world I would have started this review by saying ‘well, well, well’ but as that ship has sailed let’s just crack on with it. From the offset, let’s make it clear that Animal Well is an unusual game. Whereas most games these days are trying to make amazing technological advances, pushing the boundaries in terms of graphics and audio, pushing the PS5 or Series X to its limits. Animal Well does not do this. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve gone back in time to the mid-80s, cranked up your 48k Spectrum and your 14 inch TV box and waited through five minutes of screeching and wavy lines. The only way you’d realise you were on a current-gen machine is the HD background image on the game info screen, which Giles talked about in Episode 6. In another departure from normal ‘modern’ games Animal Well also has no introductions, no guide, no tasks, no campaign and no helpful characters guiding you into the game. Your character (is it a potato, is it a brown egg?!) appears out of a flower in the middle of the screen and you are left completely alone to figure out what the hell you’re meant to be doing. You can go left or right and you can jump – and that’s about it. Why are you there? What’s the objective? What are you? Not a clue! After a bit of wandering around you realise that certain creatures can kill you, you don’t like water and you can’t get everywhere you want to. You also discover you can save progress by clicking on a telephone and can collect some firecrackers to scare off some baddies. From there it’s a whole world / well of exploration through lots of inter-connected rooms, discovering new areas, encountering new puzzles and creatures and generally making your way through lots of new wells. You can collect some eggs on the way round, you can open some chests to get new abilities, such as the ability to use a slinky or blow bubbles which help you press certain buttons or reach high areas and you can find hidden areas by making pixel-perfect jumps through holes in the well wall. With no obvious tasks or challenges to complete a lot of your time is spent walking and jumping around, trying to find new locations and working out where you are and where you want to go on the map, which you also unlock as the game goes by. It makes the whole game fascinating, fun and frustrating in equal measures and is probably best described as a very retro puzzle platformer. If this game had come out in the 80s people would still be talking about it now, in much the same way we still talk about Dizzy, Horace, Jet Set Willy And Jetpac. But has it got enough in 2024, despite it’s retro / abysmal graphics and sound to really become a game that people will remember? For me it’s a resounding yes! It’s a lot of fun, completely different from virtually everything else out there at the moment, a nice level of challenging and just a really solid game that excels in gameplay. It’s a retro game in every sense of the word – it looks and sounds like a Spectrum game, but is also massively enjoyable, beautifully simplistic and bizarre enough to make a lasting impression on you. If you get the chance to give it a go, especially if you don’t have to pay for it, I would heartily recommend it. You might be massively underwhelmed at first, but give it a good go and you too might just fall in love with it ❤️

The Alternative View – by Giles

Yep, I agree with pretty much all of what James said basically. I thought the game was a real gem and really enjoyed my time with it for the most part, though with one big caveat that I’ll get to later.

I actually loved the presentation. Sure, it’s basic but it’s like nothing I’ve seen or played in years and it was nice to take things back to basics and not have to learn 600 buttons and systems or have a 3 hrs download before you could get going! I think the sound deserves special credit though and the minimalist drips, creaks and echoes really added to the sense of place. You can nearly feel the cold,
damp air. It’s full of secrets too, so you really do feel like you are exploring this weird and wonderful place in which you find yourself. And the animals you meet are a really fun mix of charming and downright terrifying – for example, that ghost cat/dog thing will surely haunt me forever.

So that caveat I mentioned? Well for most of the game I thought it managed a near perfect balance – ensuring that each time I wondered if I was completely lost or stuck I’d try something logical and have one of those regular eureka moments which would save me and bring a big dumb smile to my face. But then I hit a point when they just stopped coming and I found myself wandering the large map fairly aimlessly with scarce and minor breakthroughs that barely advanced me at all.

I’m happy to put that down to a “me” problem but it was jarring and disappointing after the game had balanced this so well up to that point. I persevered for a few sessions with no real progress and while I know I could look up a guide (and was definitely tempted to) that felt like it would defeat the whole point of the game for me so I just preserved until I didn’t. Yep, I’m afraid I rolled off this one before rolling credits (and I hear there’s plenty more game after that) which was a bit of a shame as I had really enjoyed it up to this point, but also a relief in the end.

At its best, Animal Well was an unlikely contender for my favourite games of the year but, ultimately, I stopped enjoying myself and ended up bouncing off. I’ll never know all its secrets or escape to tell the tale but it was fun while it lasted – well, mostly