About halfway through Animal well, I felt like I had been lied to. I read the whole glowing Comments of the game and I heard the breathless praise heaped on social media. But my expectations didn't match my reality… until I finished the game. Now I'm on track to 100% completion of a game that I was seriously considering abandoning.
Spoilers for Animal well are below.
Even though I loved Animal wellThe new take on traditional movement capabilities – the tools it provides have multiple clever uses – the platform itself often feels demoralizing. Initially, Animal wellThe platform felt like it had difficulty spikes that were both too large and too frequent. I could often see where I needed to go and how to get there (and I often watched video guides to confirm I was doing it correctly with the right tools), but in reality the execution was more laborious than fun and engaging.
Even though I loved Animal wellThe novel draws on traditional movement abilities, with the platforming itself often being demoralizing.
I always thought that the difficulty of a task in a platform game should be proportional to its importance: the most difficult moments should be reserved for secrets and optional objectives, while everything involved in completing the game should be more accessible. This way I always control my experience and, above all, I continue to having an experiment. If reaching a secret is harder than I would like, then I can choose to continue and beat the game with a lower completion percentage point. But if just getting from point A to point B is too difficult, opting out means removing yourself from the game altogether. Animal well's platform convinced me that I would hit an obstacle so frustrating that I would quit and never return.
Fortunately, this did not happen. Somehow I persisted long enough to collect all four animal flames to complete the first “ending” of the game, thinking I would stop there. But then, just before the final encounter, I found a room littered with skulls containing an upgrade to the bubble wand item. Remember this, it will be important in a moment.
The bubble wand creates small bubble platforms that you can jump onto, but you can only blow one at a time. Upgraded bubble wand lets you blow several bubbles which, with the right technique, will allow you to bypass many of the game's obstacles.
Remember skulls? I realized that all the skulls in this room, stacked high enough for me to reach the wand, represented the number of times I had died. With this realization, I was shocked: even though I wasn't initially excited about the game, it still vibrated within me. The bubble wand upgrade is inaccessible unless you have accumulated enough skulls to build a platform to it. The only way I got what ultimately made this game click for me was because of all the frustration it put me through in the first place.
When I realized this, I started laughing maniacally, with tears in my eyes, thinking: “Oh, you cheeky bastards! I immediately went back to the start of the game to go egg hunting, which I had already decided not to do. But I was locked in now. Got it. I'm stuck in the (animal's) well now and I'll never come out.