Animal Well

[Tobal]

Nice looking flick screen platform adventure with core gameplay much like Fez or in recent times Tunic where the surface game is a collect-a-thon for hidden eggs, getting handful of tools to help you platform and solve the room puzzles, then post ending is all the hidden stuff, then even more stuff hidden behind that stuff.

Things i like about these types of games is being able to do the puzzles the wrong way, at least 5 puzzles i sequence broken just trying all manor of tool combinations and later found the correct way when hunting for eggs. Plenty of hidden walls and stuff waiting to be smashed once you have the right tool, and those tools all have hidden facets to them, the Metroid equivalent of the ball bomb is ready to use to get into places you normally would be in.

However it'd not all plain sailing, the map is quite hard to read and the fast travel extremely limited, the platforming is responsive but gameplay around recovery delay after eating water or spikes is frustratingly slow and getting hit by enemies obscures you so much is easy to lose track of your little slime ball thing and end up falling off a ledge somewhere.

Death is a strange one, sometimes it will save puzzle progression mid attempt while in other puzzles it'll fully reset, and it will be all the way back to the sparsely populated save points which could be 4-5 screens away, so some patience is definitely required.

About 8 Hours in i reached ending 1, so i'm currently looking in every nook and cranny for leads on the advanced puzzles which like the other mentioned games, they could have been done from the start. Done a few of them now and have leads on 3 others.

Cleared the Fish tunnel area, the Gecko area, found 3 rabbits while searching for the whereabouts of the

->Open Spoiler<-

Kangaroo and Candle/matches

on road to 64 eggs.

[Tobal]

I've now finished as much i wanted to with the game to get the 2nd ending after getting 64 eggs, though i did have to look up what to do with the final item as the game as real problem with letting you know what things are called in your inventory so if you miss item name as you hover over to pick it up, it's gone for good. If i could have seen the name again for what picked up at the end which was

->Open Spoiler<-

a 65th egg called manticore i would have know at least which area on the massive map to go look in which would have at most been 4 rooms, as i'd trained myself so well to just forget what an egg was called straight away after collecting 64 of the mucking things so it was unneeded information

The last of the puzzles 'layer 3' as the games fans call it to collect the rabbits, seem way more cryptic, often needing information outside the game to understand, i managed 4 of them just before i got to 64 eggs (they where quite solvable in game) but now looking up 3 of the leads i have suspicions on (now i've given up) is very annoying stuff like

the egg room

->Open Spoiler<-

, and the code dial near it was easy enough to see what i needed to do, the egg with the UV light on them had a musical note, the code wheel gives with 3 of the 8 notes and expects you to now it's in binary and thus needs counting in binary for the lines of dots on each 'dice' connected to the code wheel to figure out where note lines go... **** that off. My other leads i looked up included being on the end of already solved community ARG puzzle to bring back the correct pieces to complete your picture, and last puzzle i spotted was the map icons and dots on certain pillars, that turns out you need to do some connect the dots on the map to get a flute song which does something else

Good fun while it lasted which was 13 hours in all to reach end 2. I'll probably come back with a guide in a month when the fans figure out the clock and other further layered puzzles

[Golgo]

Thanks for the write up Tobal , I've had a keen eye on this but I'm turned off by the puzzle obscurities you mention including the expectation of crowd solutions outside the game. I love puzzle games, no matter how tough, and I'm perfectly happy to be beat fairly. But when the info I need to solve them is outside the game or built on expectations of other competencies, e.g. knowledge of binary code, I lose patience.

[Tobal]

Thanks for the write up Tobal , I've had a keen eye on this but I'm turned off by the puzzle obscurities you mention including the expectation of crowd solutions outside the game. I love puzzle games, no matter how tough, and I'm perfectly happy to be beat fairly. But when the info I need to solve them is outside the game or built on expectations of other competencies, e.g. knowledge of binary code, I lose patience.

I wouldn't let the layer 3 puzzles turn you off what is good puzzle adventure game, all 64 eggs are all doable if you're up for spotting details and patterns along with alot of leeway with getting inventive with tool uses where you can do puzzles without the correct tool and of course staring at the map for gaps in the blue lined walls.

As it about £12 on switch/PC or 'free' on psn+ (where i played it) it's certainly worth a go and for most people it's good 13-15 hour game.

[Golgo]

Thanks, mate. Very helpful clarification.

[importaku]

Been playing a couple of hours so far the lighting and animation are wonderful. So far the puzzles have been straightforward, figuring out how to use the slinky and the disc have been fun especially the disc as i have managed to use it to get to some tricky to reach places curious what other items are hidden away in this vast labyrinth of oddness. Looking forward to seeing how obscure the puzzles get as that was one aspect of fez i absolutely loved, the many layers of stuff in there.