Animal Well: The Metroidvania as a Locked Room

Animal Well has no attack button. You spend a couple of hours waiting for it — the metroidvania contract has been the same since 1986, you get a weapon early and better weapons later — and it never arrives. What arrives instead is a bubble wand.

Billy Basso built the game alone over roughly seven years, on his own engine, and Bigmode published it on 9 May 2024 for PC, PS5 and Switch. It is about thirty-odd megabytes. That number gets quoted a lot as a novelty and it’s actually a design fact: everything in this world is procedurally lit, hand-authored and reused, and reuse is the entire principle the game runs on.

The toolset is a set of questions

Take the bubble wand. It fires a bubble that floats up and pops after a moment. Stand on it and you get a platform. Fire again while airborne and you get another, so the wand is a double-jump, and a triple, and an arbitrary-height climb if your timing is good enough — the skill ceiling is entirely yours and the game never mentions it.

The bubble is also a light source. It’s also something an enemy will follow. It’s also a thing you can push into a place you can’t reach. One item, and by the time you’ve had it for an hour you’ve used it in four incompatible ways, none of which the game taught you.

Every tool works like this. The yo-yo goes out and comes back and can trip a switch you’re standing away from, or bonk something, or hold a plate down for exactly as long as its travel allows. The slink walks along a floor and up a wall. The flute makes a noise, and noises mean things to animals. The disc has physics. The firecrackers make light and sound and pressure at once, which is three different keys in one hand.

This is the design that makes the missing attack button work. In a normal metroidvania, an item is a permission — the double jump means the ledges marked “double jump” are now available. Here an item is a verb with properties, and the properties interact with a world that was built with those properties in mind rather than with the item’s advertised purpose. The door doesn’t open because you have the key. The door opens because you noticed that a bubble floats, and there’s a fan, and the fan is on.

Why the fear works without combat

Removing combat should have removed tension. It doesn’t, and the reason is a change of relationship.

The animals in Animal Well are hazards with behaviour. The chained dog lunges to the end of its chain. The ostrich charges in straight lines and wrecks the terrain it hits. The chameleon watches. You cannot delete any of them, so you have to learn them — where the reach ends, what the pattern is, what makes them move — and the knowledge you build is the same knowledge you’ll need for the puzzle in that room, because the animal is part of the puzzle in that room.

That’s a much older relationship with an enemy than the modern genre’s. When a monster is a health bar, you solve it by arithmetic. When a monster is a machine you can’t switch off, you solve it by watching it. The dread that builds in the back half of this game comes almost entirely from things that could be trivially killed in any other metroidvania and here just keep existing.

The save system does its share. You light candles as you go, and a lit candle is a checkpoint — a small warm thing you made in a place that didn’t have one. Deaths are cheap. The tension comes from being somewhere dark that doesn’t know you exist.

The map is the puzzle

The pause map is a beautiful, mostly useless drawing of where you’ve been. You can stamp it with markers — a limited set of icons — and that stamping is the whole navigational system, because nothing else records anything. No quest log. No “you have not yet visited” highlight. No fast travel until you find it.

So the map becomes a notebook, and the notebook becomes the thing you’re actually playing with. What you stamp is a record of your own hypotheses: a stamp here means “there’s a hole I couldn’t reach”, a stamp there means “the fan does something”. Which means when you finally understand a system, the payoff arrives as a sudden re-reading of a dozen stamps you made hours ago and didn’t understand at the time.

I mapped games on graph paper in the eighties because the C64 gave you no other option, and the thing I’d half forgotten until this game reminded me is that the paper wasn’t a chore. It was where the thinking happened. Sixteen bits of RAM saved on a map screen bought a whole category of player engagement, and the industry spent thirty years buying it back with waypoints. Animal Well just declines the purchase.

The ancestor

Everyone says La-Mulana, and everyone is right. Nigoro’s 2005 game (remade in 2012) is the direct forebear: an interlocking underground, puzzles solved by cross-referencing information from other rooms, an in-game notebook, and a total refusal to signpost. If you loved Animal Well’s middle layers, La-Mulana is where they came from and it’s harder.

Fez (Polytron, 2012) is the other parent, for the metapuzzle architecture — the game underneath the game, cracked collectively by strangers on forums. And further back, the eight- bit arcade adventures: Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum and C64 in 1984, a house of rooms with no explanation and no mercy, where the community mapped it because the game plainly wasn’t going to.

For the modern relatives, Tunic does the same withholding through a fake instruction manual and is the closest sibling in spirit. Blue Prince takes the same “the room is the riddle” idea somewhere architecturally stranger. And Metroid Dread is the useful contrast: the genre’s founding studio, doing the orthodox version, extremely well, with every door colour-coded.

Where it fights itself

The obscurity has a floor and a ceiling, and both are real problems.

The floor: some of the first-layer solutions read as guesswork rather than deduction, and there’s a difference between a game that withholds information and a game that hasn’t given you enough to reason with. A few of the mid-game item uses land on the wrong side of that line, and the honest experience for most players involves at least one wiki tab.

The ceiling: the later layers are, by design, community puzzles — the kind of thing solved by a hundred people pooling screenshots for a week, involving out-of-game reasoning that no individual is expected to complete. I admire the ambition and I’ll say the quiet part: that content isn’t really for you, playing alone, in 2024 or later. It’s an artefact of a moment, and the moment has passed. The game’s first ending is complete and satisfying. Everything past it is a different hobby.

The verdict, argued

Animal Well is the most confident piece of design I’ve played this year, and the confidence shows up as subtraction. No attack. No tutorial. No objective marker. No dialogue. What’s left is a world where every object has properties, every animal has behaviour, and every locked door is locked by your own failure to notice something that’s already on screen.

That’s the whole pitch and it’s a real one. One man, one engine, seven years, thirty megabytes, and a design that gets more out of a bubble than most studios get out of an arsenal. The size is a consequence of building a game out of interactions rather than assets, and that’s the thing to take from it.

It’s on PC, PS5 and Switch, and it plays fine on all three. Go in blind. Stamp the map. Resist the wiki for as long as your pride holds.

Play next: Tunic, immediately, and Blue Prince after.

Spoilers below

The first ending is a lie of omission, and it’s the best-constructed lie in the game.

You collect the four flames, you open the door, you leave, and the credits acknowledge you. It’s a complete metroidvania: a couple of hours of clean, weird, well-paced work with a proper shape. Then you find tools the first layer never asked for, and the world you finished turns out to have been the tutorial layer of a considerably larger object.

Layer two is the eggs. Sixty-four of them, scattered through rooms you’d already cleared, reachable with tools used in ways the first layer never demanded. The bubble wand you’d been double-jumping with becomes a precision climbing rig. The yo-yo becomes a measuring device. Nothing new is added; the same verbs are asked harder questions. That’s the design thesis proven on itself — the game demonstrates that its own toolset had depth it never showed you, which is a claim most games make in marketing and none of them can cash.

Then layer three, and this is where Fez’s ghost walks in. The bunny mural. Sixteen rabbits hidden behind puzzles that reach outside the game — pattern-matching across rooms, information that only means something once you’ve seen an unrelated wall two hours away, and at the far end a set of solutions that were genuinely cracked by a Discord full of strangers in the weeks after launch, working together, screenshotting everything.

I’m ambivalent about that last tier and I’ve said why. What I’m not ambivalent about is what it reveals: the entire game was built downwards from the metapuzzles, and the two-hour metroidvania on top is the skin. The reused rooms, the sparse decoration, the thirty megabytes, the animals that persist because you can’t kill them — all of it exists so that every screen can be evidence for something you haven’t thought of yet.

Which is why the locked room is the right frame. You stand in the same rooms the whole time, in front of the same objects, getting slowly less stupid. The labyrinth was always this size.