Hello Gamers!
This is my first post here, I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to do it because I love video games and I've played video games all my life, in fact I have some that I would love to share.
I'm not sure about some of the community guidelines but I hope to be able to post more reviews like this here, I also have a YouTube channel where I recommend titles but I'll share that later.
Today we're going to talk about Animal Well, a video game that I frankly haven't seen many creators share, at least not in the way I think it should be shared, this game is so good..
It starts off simple with an organism wandering through a series of platform levels but if we're curious little by little we'll get an idea of everything that this game hides.
It's an exploration title that opens slowly, we start with a dark room with some lights that guide us to a lever, when we activate it it seems that nothing happens but when we return to the dark room we can see some extra lights
This is how it cultivates our curiosity, there are platform sections and secret passages in the dark, but what I want to focus on in this post is exploration
Once you get to that dark room you can spend hours looking around, entering other rooms and essentially covering a good part of the game, even being in the prologue there is a lot to do and there are mechanisms that with a little ingenuity we can reveal.
It's hard to give a sneak peek of this game without giving a huge spoiler of everything it has, but our main objective, at least in the beginning, is to reveal all the secrets that these dark rooms have. We discover items with which we can illuminate certain parts of them, as well as puzzles with light effects.
It's a genre they call Metroidvania. In many rooms we'll have to pass through them and then return to them with some item that helps us see beyond the darkness. My first experience noticing this was with the mini light bombs in the game, where if you went back to a previous room you could see hidden passages when you threw them.
But I'm revealing a lot here. As I said, I think it's a graphical experience in many ways, and also a sound experience. Please play this game using headphones.
There are some platforming sections that can be difficult but I don't think they're anything we haven't seen before unless as I said you want to go through the secret passages that the game has and that give you some special items.
Some puzzles take time to solve and I think that's another fun part of the game, despite being a short title compared to others I think it's the puzzles that require all our attention that ultimately make the duration longer.
Most of the more complicated rooms will require a couple of minutes to complete, it's not an easy task but both the controls and the way the game works give us total control over the character so we can learn in the meantime.
Each area we can be in the game has its secrets, and it is our job and our curiosity to reveal each one of them, the most surprising thing is that each one of these secrets influences the game and they are not just some decorations along the way
That is another additive that I would put in the positive points, everything has a meaning or a reason for being in this game, you will never be left with the feeling of emptiness for spending 2 hours trying to pass an area only to discover that the reward is useless.
Although there is not much variety of items, there is in the ways that we can use them, again as I said before I think that darkness and what we can do with it plays a very important role in the title as a whole.
If there is a game that reminds me of this title, I think it should be FEZ, which I played a lot when I was a kid and at some points it made my head explode because of how complicated some areas seemed
Only to come back half an hour later and solve it without too much trouble, that eureka feeling is given to you by this game multiple times throughout all the rooms it has, and the end... well I'm not going to give a huge spoiler here so you'll have to play it
If you happen to read this I can only thank you for reading my reviews, I'm not an expert in writing by any means but I want to share my experiences here while I'm playing video games, I don't do it very often these days but I'll probably have time to make a post a week
THANK YOU VERY MUCH, SEE YOU
- All content is mine unless I state the source
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This video game does look very nice, it reminds me a bit of Metroid on Nintendo NES.
What an interesting puzzle concept! The Metroidvania setting takes a certain type of player that is persistent, I think, but I've never made much progress while playing it and usually drop it after a few hours of no progress.
I think your review was pretty informative without giving away too much about how to progress and important locations.
Keep up the great work and welcome to the Hive Gaming community!
It's very good, I liked it a lot and the artwork is splendid.