Animal Well

Billy Basso spent about seven years building Animal Well alone, writing his own engine and drawing the pixel art himself. The result arrived on May 9, 2024, published by Bigmode, the label Jason "videogamedunkey" Gastrow and Leah Gastrow started. It hit Windows, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch on day one, and an Xbox Series X/S version followed in October 2024.

You play an unnamed blob hatching from a pink flower into a damp underground labyrinth. There is no plot beyond that, and the game never offers one. What it offers instead is a dense, folding map packed with animals, most of them harmless and some of them not, plus a handful of tools that each open up the world in ways you do not expect at first. A bubble wand. A spinning top. A yo-yo. Basso designed the mechanics first and built the puzzles out of how those mechanics collide with each other, which is why so many rooms reward a second look rather than a faster thumb.

The art pulls from gardens and urban spaces around Chicago, and the presentation has the texture of a place that has been growing in the dark for a long time. Reviews from IGN, Kotaku, and Thinky Games all landed positive, with Kotaku treating it as a Game of the Year contender. It took Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction at the 28th D.I.C.E. Awards. The deepest secrets are built for a crowd, not a solo player, and the community that formed around cracking them is arguably the game's second half. [edit]

Combat is almost an afterthought here. You can count the actual threats on one hand, and most of the animals in the well are obstacles, tools, or set dressing rather than enemies. The real work is reading a room. You look at a gap, a switch, a ledge, and a creature doing something odd, then you try a thing and see what happens. IGN called it "a veritable feast of brain teasers" and noted that it cares far more about twisting your mind than about grueling platforming, which lines up with how the difficulty actually lands.

The tools do the heavy lifting. The bubble wand lets you create platforms out of thin air, the spinning top turns into a moving surface you can ride or launch from, and the yo-yo doubles as a ranged trigger and a grappling point. None of them are explained much. You get one, you poke at it, and eventually you notice a wall you could not reach before. The map folds back on itself constantly, so a room you dismissed in the first hour becomes the key to a corridor you find six hours later. A lot of the satisfaction comes from memory. You saw something three screens ago and did not know what it meant yet. Now you do.

Layered on top of the standard route is a second and third layer of secrets that most players will never find on their own. Community guides split the game into tiers, and the "true ending" sits well past the credits most people see. Some of the final riddles were designed to require coordination between groups of players, which is a strange and lovely thing to build into a single-player game. Any% speedruns now sit under thirty minutes, which tells you how much of the map a practiced player can compress once the routing is solved. [edit]

There is no story, and that is the point. A blob hatches from a flower. The flower is pink. The well is dark. Basso has said the silence is intentional, and the game never once breaks it with text, dialogue, or a cutscene that explains what any of this means. Whatever narrative exists lives in the environment: the way rooms connect, the animals that watch you, the strange machinery buried in the lower levels.

What the game does instead of a plot is bury a mystery in its own structure. The standard ending closes one loop. The true ending, which requires hunting secrets far beyond the normal path, closes a much bigger one, and getting there involves codes, hidden rooms, and in some cases the collective effort of the player base working in parallel. The well is the story. You are just the thing that crawled into it. [edit]