Animal Well Is a Delightfully Unconventional Take on a Puzzle Platformer

ign.com:

2D puzzle platformers often have some fairly recognizable similarities. I’ve played enough to know that I’ll probably unlock a double jump at some point, eventually find a new item to beat enemies I can’t harm yet, or likely find some sort of lantern if there are areas obscured by darkness. Animal Well has all of those things, but never quite in the way I was used to. Instead of a double jump, you’ll be blowing bubbles to hop on top of, and instead of a lantern you’ll get a glowy yo-yo. It twisted my expectations of the genre at every turn, and consistently delighted me as I discovered more of its quiet, pixelated world.

Animal Well has you hopping around as a little blob, exploring the branching paths of its map to do… something. It’s rarely explicit with its explanation of pretty much anything you are doing, but I never felt like I was lost or didn’t have a drive to find more either. I simply picked a path and explored what I could, and it was rare I wasn’t rewarded for doing so. I enjoyed that freedom, even when it occasionally left me wondering if I should have gone up instead of down.

As you explore, you’ll run into interesting boss encounters that reward you with new items, but even these bosses were not what I would have expected. While there are enemies that want to do you harm, Animal Well doesn’t really have any sort of combat for you to retaliate with. That generally turns the enemies into puzzles to solve or obstacles to avoid rather than direct confrontations, and many of the boss encounters are no exception as you figure out the trick to proceed past them. That includes things like trying to avoid the long neck of an ostrich underground or using the bubbles fired by a seahorse to reach buttons on the ceiling.