#3: Animal Well

There is a genre of indie games in which it’s all about the impossible cleverness of the developer, layers of irony folding into one another, online communities picking apart secrets buried within secrets, and the whole thing just seems exhausting. Animal Well is the antithesis of all this, while being better at delivering the same!

Animal Well is a wonderful platform game in its own right, even if you “only play it once,” or choose not to continue after you reach its initial ending. You will have a very satisfying experience in a fascinating pixel world, solving intricate puzzles, learning the game’s unique mechanics, and rewardingly fathoming how to access new sections of a Metroidvania that seems to defy linear space. You could play it like that, and walk away happy.

Or you could become intrigued by all those eggs.

This is a game you literally cannot fully complete without out-of-game collaboration, one that requires shared knowledge and discussion. As you peel back the layers, you not only realize that it just keeps getting deeper, but also that the layers you peeled were far more meaningful than you’d recognized at the time. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, a seven-year creation by a solo developer, that wants to reward you more and more the further you want to dig.

But, crucially, it’s also a stunning puzzle-platformer within all that clever-clever framework—so much so that once you’ve finished that core game, you’ll likely be so desperate for more you won’t be able to help but start delving. — John Walker