demagogue on 30/5/2024 at 04:38
FTR, the actual platforming, on both the puzzle & twitch fronts, isn't all that intense in Animal Well.
It's not nothing, but I think it was lighter than Fez, definitely Celeste.
Sometimes you have to figure out the right way to approach a thing, or wait for the right tool.
But Fez is definitely the right paradigm anyway.
Thirith on 30/5/2024 at 09:51
I found Fez easier to jump in, go over a couple of puzzles, and jump out again. It's a game where I found it easy enough to play it quite casually, dipping in and out if I had 10-20 minutes and just wanted to chill a bit with the Disasterpeace music and the pixel art world. To me, Animal Well feels more involved. I've had more moments where I headed in a certain direction, died before finding a save point, had to get back there, tried again, failed again, went back to the save point etc. I'm still not talking about putting in an hour that's then wasted because of badly placed save points, but with Animal Well I get the impression that I should have at least half an hour, ideally more, to make any real progress. The two games aren't miles apart, but I definitely found Fez more chill than Animal Well.
Aja on 15/7/2024 at 21:45
I'm not going to spoiler tag my entire post, so if you're completely spoiler averse, stop reading now. I'll put major spoilers in tags, though.
I finished Animal Well, which isn't really finishing it at all, and then I started to enjoy it a lot more, especially with some of the tools you unlock after completion. The pace changes in the postgame. Instead of being driven toward the next boss, it became about solving all the micropuzzles, and for a while I found it engrossing although every time I thought I'd made a breakthrough, I'd almost immediately hit another wall. But the thrill of discovery persisted. Eventually I was only a few eggs short, and I could see two treasure chests from the remote that I couldn't access, and I spent hours prodding every nook and cranny in the adjacent rooms without success and began to get bored.
I started skimming a Reddit hints post, and there was talk that some of the game's puzzles are not solvable by an individual or, at the very least, require participating in meta games online. Since I didn't know if my puzzles were among those, I looked at few hints and spoiled at least one puzzle, the skeleton fish, that I probably could've figured out on my own, and that felt bad. But one of the chests I couldn't figure out was the barcode puzzle, which I never in a hundred years would've got..
I did manage to find all the eggs and some of the rabbits and got a second ending, but there's obviously a lot left to solve. The problem is whether or not I can solve it or whether it's the case that I could scour every room a hundred times and never figure it out for other reasons. So I may be done with Animal Well.
I guess that sounds overly negative, but my opinion of the game has mostly increased. I liked the main game, I loved the postgame, and I'm less enamoured with the post-postgame, but that's not so much the fault of the game as it is my personal preferences as I know some people eat this stuff up. I also know that the more spoilers I look up, the less I'll care about it, but I'm also not sure if I want to devote hours and hours to solving the remaining puzzles. Maybe I'll just take a break.
In the end: Animal Well good, maybe very good, but keep in mind that only the most dedicated players will see everything. That's probably okay.
Anarchic Fox on 16/7/2024 at 20:35
I had a great time with Animal Well, and nonetheless hit a distinct point where I thought "Okay, no more, I'm done." That point was when you get the UV light. Now I faced the prospect of revisiting every room looking for hints while enduring a garish color scheme. I had about 3/4 of the eggs.
I do enjoy the entire category of games with a solid core and a layer (or two, or three, or...) of metapuzzles. Examples I can think of: Fez, The Witness, Noita, Antimatter, Paquerette down the Bunburrows, Void Stranger, The Fool's Errand; more are welcome.
Aja on 16/7/2024 at 22:15
The nice thing about the UV light is how fast it is to click it off and on. All of Animal Well's tools are like that, very responsive and tactile. But I agree, the prospect of having to scour the entire map again is offputting.
nicked on 24/7/2024 at 16:30
Yeahhh I don't think this game is for me. Insanely, frustratingly fiddly trial-and-error platforming combined with few-and-far-between limited save points. I spent a horrible 20 minutes trying to jump on the bubbles spewed by some sort of water horse, in order to reach some out-of-reach buttons, finally did it and got a bubble-shooting wand myself, only to reach a part where I couldn't work out how to progress even with the bubble wand, had to quit because of work, and now I'm back before the a-hole seahorse again. If you're going to force me to complete nails-hard platforming challenges, at least have the decency to autosave after each one so I don't have to waste my time trying them again.
