Just finished the True Ending(-ish) of Billy Basso and BIGMODE's Animal Well, and I found it to be perhaps the most unique video game I've played this year, if not this decade. That is because Animal Well is not a game. Animal Well is a crypt — a deeply buried treasure trove of delicately designed secrets and ciphers, all under the guise of an impossibly compact, albeit somewhat basic metroidvania.
When it comes to the game and its ludic elements, Animal Well is not like your typical metroidvania. It does not involve the traditional "powering up" and overcoming foes. Instead, you play as a weird, powerless shit-blob that can only run and jump. There is no combat; any unconventional item you find along your journey — be it a yo-yo, a bubble wand, or a top — serves the primary purpose of being "keys" of sorts that allow you to solve puzzles you would otherwise be unable to solve. Because there is no combat, most of Animal Well's "challenge" is found in its puzzles: which typically only ever encompass one screen, and have the tendency to be rather basic and shallow. The puzzles in major areas always feel like they're building up a mechanic or an idea, at times to the verge of great synthesis, only to eventually fall flat in terms of that final step of progression: the conclusion. Puzzle ideas are constantly thrown around, but are not seldomly left behind in favor of a new one. Because of this, puzzles and concepts related to puzzles never escalate too far beyond their basic interactions. YouTuber and game reviewer @VideoMalts I think put it well in their review, when they claimed Animal Well had "procedures" instead of puzzles, given that so many puzzles require not more than a minute of thought.
Where Animal Well perhaps falters in puzzle design, it makes up for, at least, in its exploration aspect. Items have the primary purpose of being "puzzle keys", sure, though their more interesting usage is their ability to open up areas that were previously out-of-reach, but does so in a way that feels open and never simplistic or lock-and-key. The bubble wand, for example, allows for what is essentially a double jump, giving convenient mobility and access to high ledges. The dog disc can be used to hit far-away buttons, but it has another use that makes map navigation interesting. Items in Animal Well do have a lock-and-key purpose, but beyond that, they also facilitate exploration.
Additionally, the game is incredibly, almost dizzyingly dense, and I've described its map to be "impossibly compact." Damn near every corner and dark alley in Animal Well contains something, and this is highlighted by Billy's philosophy of always rewarding the player whenever they find a new location. He said in a Double Fine Devs Play video: "When you see a ledge, and you get up there and there's nothing, it just feels awful." Not a single room is ever truly empty in this game, and at least in this particular aspect, it is a dazzling accomplishment. In pixel art, there's this common tenet that "every pixel should count". And it's as though Animal Well heard this philosophy and applied it to an entire metroidvania map. I'm impressed! Look at the map! Can you even see any gaps?!
Because items constantly encourage exploration, and because the map is designed to constantly reward exploration, Animal Well is really good at getting curious players hooked at every corner, no better than poor cats lured by fish. You thought the game's main gameplay loop was button-pushing puzzles? Technically it is, but so prominent in the player's mind are the game's secrets and offers of novelty that exploration eventually takes center stage. In a way, the game's items being toys is ironically accurate, giving the emotional sensation of (literal) childlike wonder, as you feel continuously satisfied by discovery. It's true: Animal Well is not for the incurious.
The underlying design choice of constantly rewarding the player's curiosity creates a natural lead-in from Animal Well's game to its not-game. But before that, what makes Animal Well not a game?
As you go deeper into Animal Well, you eventually start noticing and coming across more and more cryptic messages and clues into something bigger. Traversing through the game's "layers", you eventually start to unravel Animal Well's secrets, and this is where it transforms into the not-game, breaking the boundaries of its medium. When you dig enough, you'll find secrets in Animal Well that involve scanning a row of grass that's actually barcode, converting an in-game poster into a string of Unicode that gives directions, coming together with fifty people to form an image, and hell, even connecting the game to your printer. All to eventually get at the big secret hidden in this game's core.
With every step the player takes into the realm of the ARG, they continue satiating their ceaseless curiosity, as the game that hooked them from the start with discovery keeps hooking them with even more surprises and depth. Fortunately, the game has multiple endings that allow any player to stop whenever they feel like they've satisfied their curiosity enough. Personally, my true ending is Layer 2.
However, it can also be said that with every step Animal Well takes into the realm of the ARG is a step away from the video game. Of course, Layer 1 is still there: the puzzle-metroidvania is very much intact for those who want that unique but traditional gaming experience. But come Layer 3 and Layer 4, Animal Well becomes less of a game, transmogrifying the executable file into but a mere interface between ciphers, clues, and players.
This is also the part of the game where the intrinsic motivation to explore gets shoddy. The reward of secrets go from discovering new areas to increasing a hidden integer counter needed to unlock a certain something, which is used to unlock a something other. Reasons to keep digging narrow to basically doing it for the sake of going deeper. There is very little lore, for instance, that could motivate one to search. This motivation problem is only ever exacerbated nowadays, now that the ARG has been all but practically solved.
In the end, I think Animal Well is a very decent game with impressive design, but also an interesting not-game/ARG. Most interesting of all to me is how it manages to negotiate its two halves, and how it can manage to make these two communicate in ways that constantly satisfy the curious, if only at the cost of moving away from the things that made the game special to begin with. If there's any praise I can say about Animal Well's ARG, it's that it at least often does not feel like an unreasonable leap from whatever the game is.
While I do think the concept of marrying "video game" and "ARG" is still far from seeing its conceptual peak, Animal Well takes the crown so far as the quintessential not-game game. Imperfect, but an exciting blend of the two ideas nonetheless.
P.S.: By the way, if you're curious about other "not-game games", try out Kultisti's River the Dinosaur and the Mysterious Portal that Ate the Entire Existence. This is a web game where puzzles in the game can be solved via clues in the webpage. It's akin to Animal Well's later layers, though of course River the Dinosaur is far shorter, and also has no "real game" to stand as its foundation.
