Finding the First Flame in Animal Well

In this post, I discussed my first impression of a pixelated Metroidvania game called Animal Well. I described how it started as a mysterious game with no explanation or objectives. There are puzzles to solve, items to grab, and a rich atmosphere to experience.

There are so many interesting puzzles the game has, some very straightforward and can be solved in a single room while other wants you to keep track of the previous rooms and switches you pushed that can solve something in a different area.

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This game is called Animal Well, so you might expect to see a lot of animals, right? We are small creatures, and most animals are naturally hostile towards us. These dogs want to play with us and bite us. You can bait them by using your disk.

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But not all animals are hostile, and some, like the birds, help you solve puzzles by making you fly on top of them. They follow a fixed path, though, and the environment should be carefully used to get from one platform or bird to another.

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There seem to be some animal bosses in the game, too. There is an important room with four big statues of different animals. And if you look at the map, there are four flames that we have to collect. These flames might light up the base of these statues, and then something important might happen.

So my goal for now is to just explore and go towards one of the flames and see if I can take it.

There are ostrich-like creatures that want to make me their dinner. I am lucky that it is not a one-hit kill, and you get some invisibility frames before taking another damage.

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As I said earlier, there are many clever and unique puzzles in the game. One of my favourites is the following where you have to create a wave like pattern using three different levers. It took me some time to perfect the pattern that crosses all three points given to us.

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This mysterious world is full of different kinds of eggs. Most of them are found in chests. I didn't know what to do with these eggs last time. But now I do... There is an egg room, kind of like a store room for eggs, with multiple locked doors on the other side. The first door requires collecting 8 eggs, for example.

There are some cages where animals are trapped in a dark ecosystem. I didn't find a way to break these cages. Maybe there is an item that can help me break them in the future, or perhaps, they are just there to add to the atmosphere and world-building.

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One of the puzzles made me use an ostrich trapped inside a rotating wheel. This wheel was used to press four buttons at the same time. I love how the puzzles are getting more and more complex as I progress in the game. They are becoming much bigger, spanning over multiple rooms and involving multiple steps with a lot of tools and tricks.

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Looks like after that ostrich puzzle, I found my first flame. This one is called G.flame for some reason. So many things are cryptic in this game, and I have to figure out everything. I am afraid there are a lot of things in the background that I am missing, which I should not.

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Also, since the last time, I found another useful tool. A YoYo! Yup, this yoyo can be used to reach places where we normally cannot and hit things like buttons, switches or spikes.

There are dynamites in the game that open up shortcuts to other locations. I like games that do this thing. Some go make you complete a complex puzzle every time you want to go there, which shouldn't be the case, in my opinion. Once you know how to solve the puzzle and you do it the first time, the game should automatically give you an easier alternative rather than testing your skills again, even though you did it already and will only waste your time, not much.

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I collected a lot of Eggs, too, and possibly missed a lot already. I am constantly going back to the places where I have already been, just because I got a new item, and now I can reach more places and find even more hidden chests and stuff like that.

Another interesting touch is that all the eggs have different names but still none of them has rarity or classes. Each of them is just one more egg. Nothing special about it except for the fancy names.

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There are a lot of questions that still need to be answered. Who are we, and what are we doing? Are we trying to get out of this 'well' or just exploring the world as a simple creature, enjoying this animal world? We might not get answers to many of these questions but I am loving the dark atmosphere, the beautiful pixel art, attention to detail and the vast interconnect world. It all feels so alive!

What an interesting ecosystem this one developer created. And how this game is just 37 MB in size (with a world as big as this one) is beyond my wildest imaginations.

Until next time...