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by Rafiki 06/22/2024, 6:36pm PDT |
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INSIDE
Inside is worth $2. I'd even pay $5 for it. $10 is a stretch. Definitely not the base price of $20.
It's not worth full asking price because it's mostly style over substance. You travel from left to right through set pieces and solve a puzzle to advance from one set piece to the next. There's only a couple of spots that are moderately challenging. The story takes a bizarro turn towards the end (that the fucking Steam page spoils outright), but winds up being a huge disappointment because, like Limbo, it ends suddenly and without explanation or fanfare. It feels so arbitrary and abrupt that it's almost like they said, "Ok, we're out of ideas now, so fade to black."
It has a gloomy 1950s future dystopia style and, to be fair, it's one hell of a style. The visuals look great and the sound design is excellent. I am also pleased they did not pull any punches when it comes to the kid dying, whether it's being strangled to death, having his throat ripped out by a guard dog, or being fucking obliterated by a pressure wave.
ANIMAL WELL
Animal Well, on the other hand, is worth full asking price. It's a Metroid clone without combat, which makes it a Metroid clone entirely about exploration and finding secrets. It's also a little bit less linear. You're still eventually gated by the need to find new abilities, but from the start you can go in 4 or 5 different directions and get abilities in different orders which will open up different parts of the map. If you get stuck, you're not just sitting there trying to figure out one puzzle until you can advance. In Metroid fashion, you'll find yourself looping back around to previous areas and unlocking shortcuts that make navigating back and forth faster. You can even unlock a fast travel that lets you teleport around the (huge) map.
This game was made by 1 guy, and it's remarkably well designed. Controls are spot-on. There's no tutorials, just a button prompt when you pass by certain objects, and when you acquire new abilities you just experiment with them and it's pretty intuitive what the purpose is. Most of the abilities are novel and unique, none of them are single-purpose one-offs, and some have surprising interactions that you have to discover on your own and give you that "oh shit!" moment where you realize the solutions to puzzles that were blocking your path in another part of the map or prevented you from reaching an item.
It has a really good difficulty curve where you start out with some basic platforming and learning the abilities you're given, then escalating into more complex platforming, adding obstacles and hazards, juggling abilities, doing all of that simultaneously, and then forcing you to do all of that under a panic-inducing time crunch. That ffffffffffffffffffffffffFUCKING dog. And then sprinkling puzzles and a few boss fights in the middle of all of that. It's a great example of taking a few simple ideas and squeezing everything you possibly can out of them.
The game uses pixel art, which I hate, but tolerate on account of it being the product of 1 guy who's probably not a trained artist so he's working with what he's got. By default, the game has scanlines and DO NOT TURN THEM OFF. Oh god, it makes the blockiness of the graphics stand out horribly. The pixelization also works a little bit against the game because if you want to uncover all of the secrets, then you're likely going to be scouring the handheld map to try and identify pockets of unexplored areas. Sometimes it can be hard to tell if something is a gap leading to a hidden area or if it's just a blocky fucking pixel. Lighting is used to surprisingly good effect, casting shadows and adding depth to the backgrounds, and it even plays into the exploration and puzzle solving. Portions of a screen can be blacked out until you break down a wall, and opening and closing....doors? walls? can similarly shut off light sources and black out your path.
The guy who made this was also obviously not a musician or composer, so he wisely leaned into filling the game with ambient sounds that suit the environment. It creates a moody atmosphere without feeling repetitive or annoying. There's a simple tune played in safe zones and a tune played in a few other areas, but that's it for music. Sound effects are fine, but the one stand-out to me was when your health is knocked to your last heart. It has that Zelda-esque beeping sound, but it's loud for a few seconds, then gets quieter until it fades out altogether. This was a really good choice so that you're not constantly irritated by incessant beeping until you can fill your health back up.
Getting the required items to beat the main game takes about 6 hours. Then, after the main game, you can spend another 10+ hours trying to find 64 eggs to get the "Good" ending, as well as other optional secrets that squeezes usage out of every little nook in the entire world map. I enjoyed finding most of the eggs, but with the last few it did feel like kind of a chore scouring every single screen of the map with a fucking (literal) blacklight like a Dateline investigator. Most of the secrets and puzzles are reasonable, if sometimes very difficult, but some of the later optional ones are notpr0n shit. In particular, at one point I pushed a button on a console and seemingly nothing happened. Then 30 seconds later the Windows print queue popped up and told me it failed to print. At first, I thought this was some weird unrelated bug or virus or who the fuck knows, but after I pressed the button again and got a printer error, I realized it was the game trying to print something. I Googled it instead, and it turns out the game prints some origami puzzle you have to put together that gives you a clue to find another secret in the game. It's certainly unique, and it's definitely thinking outside the box, but I personally don't have the patience for it. This was probably inspired by Tunic. If these kind of obtuse internet collaboration puzzles are your thing, then there you go.
OVERALL, it's a good game. There's even an achievement that references this old clip about pooping back and forth. |
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