The review will contain full spoilers for the true ending of the game as well as mentions of child abuse/death and gore.

I was not expecting Lily's Well to be as amazing as it is. A free little MS-DOS horror game I can kill some time with? Sure, why the hell not?

The style is amateurish in a charming way, wearing its indie roots on its sleeve with art reminiscent of adolescent Deviantart pages and anime art scribbles in margins by bored teenagers. It adds to the experience a lot, giving the game a youthful energy. Which fits, since the player character is only 9, and childhood plays an important part in the story's themes.

The atmosphere is tense while not being overbearing, calling to mind oddly brutal games from the PC-98 and classic RPG maker horror. It really reminds me of what it actually felt like to wander around alone as a child, doing things you've been told not to and touching things you know you shouldn't. When the music stopped, my heart wanted to jump out of my chest. The gore, while generally sparse, is used to great effect, really hammering in how dire things are and the consequences for getting things wrong. They also serve to further your sympathy for Lily. Watching her body fall to pieces at the bottom of the well or cry for help with broke bones knowing it was by your hand makes me feel this strange sense of horror and sadness not many games really pull out of me.

There are a few flaws holding it back. Namely that while hunting for the endings can feel rewarding, it's extremely tedious to collect the rope over and over. A manual saving system would avoid this entirely, and you could still keep the overall attempts and endings in tact as well. It also had quite a few technical issues, between lag and a few crashes, it made it more difficult to play and stay immersed. This I'm willing to blame on my old potato of a laptop, but it's worth noting games like Faith and Dead Plate ran very smoothly.

With all of that out of the way, I'd like to touch on the games biggest strength, that being its story.

Lily's Well, more than anything, is about surviving abuse. Lily's father is willing to let her die over and over and over (in my playthough, 27 times) in sometimes extremely brutal ways or even by his own hands. And all to stop her from growing into a person he doesn't want her to be or from doing things he doesn't agree with. Learning things he doesn't want her to know, having the knowledge to escape him.

Yet, Lily persists. No matter how many times she dies, or how much it hurts, or how much it scares her. She wants to save the girl in the well, herself. And in the end, the way she does it is not by hurting or killing herself, but by calling for help. Reaching out to someone who knows how to keep her safe. The original Lily. The girl her father didn't want her to be, the one who survived. They embrace each other in front of the burning remains of their childhood home, and the home of every single one before them.

Lily heals her inner child, physically and emotionally, and breaks this endless cycle of torture. The young Lily sobs, she still loves her father, she even begged him with a gun to her head to love her back. But deep down she knows that the pain of mourning her abuser is better for her than forcing herself to continue to let him torment her.

Lily's Well is a chilling horror masterpiece about self love in its truest form, and I think everyone who needs a story like this deserves to play it.

Mostly just a shock/trauma bait sort of game. There are some neat monster designs but for the most part it's just grisly death scenarios for a 9 year old girl which is a little more just messed up than scary imo. The gameplay mechanics aren't anything more advanced than walking around and collecting stuff but the concept of the dad being some sort of evil university professor trying to clone his daughter is a bit interesting. I would've much preferred if we got to see and learn more about Azoth and maybe end up killing it instead of just lighting the house and well on fire in the end.

I'm not sure what it was about this game in particular that managed to grab me and pull me in so hard that I actually felt the urge to 100% it instead of just watching the rest of the endings on YouTube like I usually do. I almost NEVER 100% games, I'm just not that kind of person. Yet, something about this game captivated me enough that I wanted to here. Maybe it was just how easy it was to get all the achievements.

I'm very fickle about things being boring, too-- I have a horrible attention span and if something doesn't keep me completely entertained I will give up the second it gets too challenging. Yet, although I agree with the other reviewers here that this game did have a problem with repetitiveness, it wasn't so bad that I ever felt the urge to quit. I definitely understand the desire to be able to save whenever you want, as that would have made the game so much better in terms of repetitiveness. Yet, I also completely understand how something like savescumming (which I have 0 qualms with, I do it myself all the time) would disrupt the flow of the game. The whole point is that each time you respawn in your bedroom, it's... different. You are literally playing as a new physical character, a new puppet. And so it makes sense that before you wake back up in your room, the person who puts you there also makes sure that everything is back in place. Another reviewer here mentioned having to place the rocks in the river every time, I'm not sure if that was just changed before I played it, but I never had to do that more than once, nor did I have to get the shed key every time. The only thing I had to do on repeat was collect the ropes and items like the shears.

I will also say, I did beat this game with a walkthrough. I feel like having a guide pulled up made the game a bit more tolerable, especially for the secret endings, which may be influencing my rating a bit. And speaking of secrets and secret endings, this game makes use of forced out-of-game error messages. Something I encountered, which I feel like shouldn't have been able to happened, was the secret pantry event roll. I encountered it completely randomly before I had any idea it was even a thing. It scared me pretty bad so I just exited and re-entered, but then ended up having to respawn it because the walkthrough mentioned it was for a secret achievement.

Ultimately, I wholeheartedly recommend this game. I think it's rare for a game to captivate me like this, and if you're the kind of person who isn't ashamed to play a game with a walkthrough, then I'd definitely do so here, if only after you feel like you're stuck.