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The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 14thThe coming of the beast
The coming of the beast
Image credit:RPS
Image credit:RPS
Squeezing through the advent calendar window into a sodden glade of flower and coral, you spy a curious organism on a ledge in the shadows. It’s a video game of some description, though it looks like a squirrel, with frantic white eyes. What’s it doing? Ah, whoops, you’ve startled it. Better follow it offscreen.
It’sAnimal Well!
It’s also a brilliant metroidvania, partly because the base controls for movement are so simple and elegantly implemented, and partly because it avoids many of the usual metroidvania features. There are no unlock trees, no generic abilities like aerial dashes or extendable combos - no combat at all, in fact. Instead, you get cheerful toys like a frisbee, a slinky, or a bubble-wand.
Among Animal Well’s greatest discoveries is that reaching the credits isn’t game-over. There are items, tactics and… tendencies of the environment that threaten to break the rules and transform the game, if you carry on probing and delving. For all that, Animal Well remains graceful and easy to grasp. I’m very curious to see how future generations of player might respond to it. It might not harbour a decade’s worth of secrets, but it’ll definitely be worth returning to in 10 years time.
Brendy:I didn’t get too far in Animal Well. I gave up because of a difficult platforming bit, but up until that point I did appreciate the quiet sense of exploration and discovery that could be evoked with such a simple graphical style. Also, my cat kept chasing the little animal figures around the screen and that made me like the game even more.
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