Animal Well Done

Like seemingly everyone, my appeal and interest in 2024's Animal Well stemmed from my even much earlier interest in Videogamedunkey, the head honcho of its publisher BIGMODE and longtime Youtube veteran. A fan of his for over a decade, cutting my teeth watching his now archaic League of Legends content, I knew that he had a knack (heh) for games that were fun if nothing else. I've disagreed with my fair share of his takes, but I knew with the announcement of Animal Well that there was a vision he had in Billy Basso's breakout title. Like many others, I waited with bated breath with more information about the game's mechanics and release date. Release came and reviews were staggeringly high for the ambitious sub fifty megabyte title, whose marketing campaign effectively boiled down to "Let Dunkey cook."

A disclaimer for this review: I struggle with Metroidvania's from a personal standpoint. I've played a handful of Metroid's, got into The Messenger, and maybe one whole hour of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but I could never stick with them on the principal of how they play. Without a consistent path of clear exploration towards narrative completion, I struggle for reasons unknown. With Metroid I had a hard time putting together item unlocks to their eventual applications, and didn't do too well in remembering where to traverse. My problems with previous experiences translated almost completely to Animal Well which was... well quite a good game regardless.

Animal Well is gorgeous, one of the factors most apparent in its reveal. Each screen is filled to the brim with colour and purpose, the backdrops consisting mainly of statues, mysterious creatures, and absconding movements of water. As my little blob made his way through the games sub ten hour runtime (probably shorter if chasing the main path,) my eyes scanned just about everything within the environment because of the visual reward that entailed. One touch I greatly appreciated is the (optional) setting that places faux CRT scanlines on the screen for a more mysterious vintage feel. For a game as consistently dark and dimly lit as Animal Well, having a feature that exaggerates its despair and gorgeous loneliness like that accents your time with the game in quite a great way.

Platforming and movement in Animal Well is fairly par for the course within the realm of 2D platformers and metroidvanias as a whole. You use a small selection of items naturally found through exploration for traversal and puzzle completion. Apt timing is required for successful jumps, and running is done at a brisk enough pace to make the game feel like it has a sense of urgency and quick completion to it. One thing I do want to commend the title on within this space is that it never feels like it is trying to do too much or require a finesse in perfect timing or long jump sequences. Though the puzzles can become slightly infuriating and rub you the wrong way, the issue rarely lied in me having to gamble on a perfect platforming sequence.

I said "rarely" in that last paragraph because of one of my main gripes with Animal Well, which I might as well start off with now. One of the notable features of the game is that there is no combat... but the catch is that there are enemies. How do you fight enemies in a game where you can't actually hit them? By running away! This isn't the end of the world in theory but it leads into another issue with Animal Well: the save system. Not unfamiliar for the genre but saving and checkpoints happen at telephones scattered around the map. These are mostly well located and central to places in which you spend your time and often do unlock as you progress to become even more centralized than you first encounter them, but not all is well that ends well. There are several mandatory chasing encounters in which you must run away from a big bad that follows you screen to screen. Death, which can happen by taking damage down to zero hearts or being crushed by an object, leads you to reset at the most recently visited aforementioned telephone. I spent a disgusting amount of time last night failing in the late stages of a chase sequence only to reset at a telephone, having to run all the way to the encounter, and then run all the way to attempt to complete the segment. As a Souls player I am no stranger to runbacks, but doing this ad nauseum and having to repeat and repeat which the occasional random instant death on a platforming sequence was infuriating. Animal Well in multiple points lacks respect for player free time in having to traverse to an area where you had progressed. This becomes more annoying in the chases because you can't pause and open the map... an unfortunate page to take out of the Dark Souls cook book.

Overall Animal Well is a phenomenal debut title for BIGMODE and an impressive title put forward by Billy Basso. Even though there's no real narrative to stick to, the save system requires a lot of work, and the chase scenes are needlessly grifting... this game has a lot to like about it. I'd recommend Animal Well to casual Dunkey fans or fans of Metroidvania's.

A decent game with a great retro futurist aesthetic that has never really clicked with me. I've gotten roughly halfway through this 3 times now before getting bored and dropping it, which always surprises me because I love nearly all of the mainline entries that precede this.

Demon loyalty sounds good on paper as it helps personify your demons a bit but I'm generally not a fan of how it actually plays out during battles, especially when combined with the clunky row system which further limits your demon's actions; it ends up just making battles feel needlessly elongated and tedious compared to earlier games in the series. The story is serviceable, if not a little bland, though I'm sure it felt more original back when it was released. I also don't really understand the common love for Nemissa (outside of her cool character design) as I genuinely find it a little off-putting how often she forces Hitomi into uncomfortable situations which the game then plays off as a gag.

Radiant Historia starts extremely strong, with a puzzle-box-esque structure to the time travel that sets itself apart from Chrono Trigger despite all the noise to the contrary, and a combat system that has so much going on it made me feel like a genius once I learned to capitalize on all of the mechanics. However, by about the halfway point the cracks began to show. The story refuses to reveal many of its biggest mysterious until it's foreshadowed them on such a large variety of occasions there is no impact when they land. Likewise, the combat system lost its charm for me as things didn't develop into interesting directions, particularly highlighted by having a really bad XP curve and questionable skillsets that makes using anything other than a couple of party members kind of pointless. The added narrative content of the Perfect Chronology version also undermines what did work about the story the base game was trying to tell, particularly the ending of the base game which is so bold that undercutting it feels like it should be a crime. I still liked this game quite a bit, but the problem areas grated me enough that I couldn't love it wholeheartedly the way I wanted to from the opening hours.

Struggled to put together my thoughts on this. Escalates from mediocre to engaging somewhere about ten hours in, followed immediately by an overwhelming sense of emptiness. All of Bethesda's quirks are here in the worst ways: dead mannequin npcs, clumsy systems that don’t quite cohere, a terrible main quest that drifts across the flimsy surface of alien artifact sci-fi stories.

But something worse about this one is the lack of texture. There are very few freaks, minor discoveries off the beaten path, companions that make you feel something (Nick <3). Everyone is so nice, the politics completely empty. Cities are so strange and dead, with sound design attempting to evoke the density of Night City but lacking any real scale - the abstraction of a fantasy setting no longer here to distract you from asking: why is this just one square block?

This must’ve been a monumental effort to produce, but why dedicate seven years to creating a pale echo of The Expanse, Mass Effect & Firefly? There are hints of another game in here - one with meaningful travel and fewer, more fleshed out worlds - that was abandoned prior to shifting to this smooth, soulless, bloated final form.

Altogether, I would describe gaming as a rather unpretentious medium, as most story-driven games are too busy wearing their hearts on their sleeves to be considered pretentious. This is something of a disappointment for me, because I love pretentious things. Absolutely adore them. I find that people who are a little too confident in what they're trying to say often will find fascinating ways to say them. If that fascination happens to also come with a little bit of ego-stroking, then so be it. And dear reader, let me tell you, Disco Elysium has all the pretentious flaire of a 1970s rock opera. You cannot possibly convince me that “evil apes dukin’ out on a giant ball” was a sentence written by someone who didn't think they were being at least a little bit clever while they were doing so, nor can you convince me that Disco Elysium isn't all the better for it. Disco Elysium is a pioneer in the field of pretentious video games, and more games ought to follow in its example.

Disco Elysium is also home to some absolutely stellar worldbuilding. The murder mystery the game ostensibly focuses on is less so the game's main concern and more so an excuse for the game to explore various socio-political ideas through the characters involved in and events leading up to the murder. The way the game then takes real world political ideologies and seamlessly weaves them into the context of its fictional world's history is a sight to behold. I can't claim to have fully picked up on all of it, but I know strong commentary when I see it.

Unfortunately, it is that strong worldbuilding and political commentary that leads me to my main complaint regarding Disco Elysium, which is that it wasn't always clear to me how exactly my choices impacted the narrative. The game opens with a large array of stats to distribute points between and seems to put on emphasis on role playing Harry how you think he should act, but apart from a couple of Thoughts and quests exclusive to the Final Cut version of the game, it never really felt like the way I chose to role play Harry had a massive impact on the world itself. I don't have a problem with linearity by itself, but when you try to present linearity as non-linearity, it becomes harder for me to fully immerse myself. I respect the game's commitment to being basically a visual novel, in the most literal sense of the term, but in this case, I don't think it would've hurt too much to lean into its gamier elements and include an alignment meter or something.

Also—and these technical complaints don't actually affect my opinion on the game itself, but they need to be mentioned—the Switch port of this game is extremely unpolished. Frame rate drops to a halt during autosaves, incorrect voice lines will occasionally load in, the audio quality of the voice lines are all over the place, and to top it all off, my game soflocked a solid three or four times and crashed to the home screen another three times on top of that. This is not a graphically intensive game, it really should not run this poorly.

This is mindlessly pleasant for broad sections and competently includes familiar feeling Star Wars sights and sounds as well as a glutted mishmash of open-world action RPG systems you’ve seen in better games before. It’s a decent enough version of this sort of big budget IP-laden game, but it really pales in comparison to Spider-man 2 and it’s a shame I played that immediately before this.

And wow does it need to be edited down to about half its size (something it could learn from Spidey 2). There’s so many little systems and collectibles that feels included for reasons that aren’t “they’re consistently fun and fresh to complete.” There are so many boring collectibles dotted around in obvious and stupid locations; oh no, a T-branch in a hallway…guess it’s time to figure out which way is the advancing path so I can run to the end of the other path first to collect a shiny bit of nothing!

This is also a shockingly rough game technically (on PS5, not even the poorly regarded PC version). It hurts immersion so much to see the graphics oftentimes quickly painting themselves into place when coming out of the map+menu screens, to say nothing of how many times I got stuck in or under level geometry glitches, and ran into several occurrences where the textures seemingly all got dumped and left me in a black wire-framed void for several seconds. Worse than graphics stuff are the narrow strictures on intended traversal in a game that asks you to explore its environment using an air dash and double jump and gliders. Oops, you managed to get to a ledge for a collectible we didn’t intend on yet and you haven’t stopped at a save point in a while? Well, guess who’s stuck until they kill themselves from fall damage and lose progress! I’m not the sort of player who thinks about or attempts sequence breaking, and I stumbled into four separate occurrences here without meaning to. That could be neat if progression didn’t feel so tightly authored, but instead it always left me feeling anxious wondering what buggy nuisance I’d run into since I’d wandered out of the intended experience.

This game is incredibly, incredibly "fine," more fine than any other LAD game I've played. It doesn't have any of the highs that say, an entry that Y2 or Y6 has, but its mostly absent of any lows that those games have. The game's story was just very fine, and lacked some of the hype from previous games; I just had a hard time believing that there were actual stakes in any of the fights, if I'm being honest. Maybe its because we've seen Kiryu kick so much ass to this point, or that we knew that Kiryu has to make it through this one, or because its insanely easy to make Kiryu turbo overpowered if you just do the side content, even on hard mode. Of course, it doesn't make the game bad; I think the absurdity of the upgraded agent style is hilarious, and the side content, as always, is generally enjoyable, and the game's ending has some good scenes mixed in, I just find that the game wasn't enough about the ending and felt more like a game that should've been an infinite wealth expansion pack than a game. Despite all that I, the game is still good, maybe only cause of how sucked in I got into the side content as much as it retreads old stuff. The characters we meet are also decent, but Akame in particular stands out from the bunch and is the game's spotlight. Just be warned that if you're one of the people that just plows through the main story... you won't be here very long. I had like over 40 hours in this game, and barely any of it was spent on the main narrative. Also, on a personal note, the game failed to address my biggest problems with Y6 and its treatment of Haruka, but I guess that's on me for expecting that to be addressed.

Short version: Fine game, isn't gonna rock you off your socks, Y5 still should've been the last Kiryu game.

I do not understand the acclaim this game has received like at all: the writing is 4th grade level at best, the dialogue itself is so dull it gave me a migraine within the first hour, and the plot feels like a bunch of aimless tropes that they couldn't be bothered to flesh out enough to allow for even a little bit of narrative parity between character motivations and the events unfolding (though maybe they expect you to have played The Messenger to understand certain aspects of the game's worldbuilding? idk). The main characters are basically nothing, Garl's whole schtick is annoying and forced, and pretty much every interaction feels like it was written for a Nick Jr. show or something.

The combat is serviceable, and I had fun with the boss fights at least. It isn't enough to say that it's merely inspired by Super Mario RPG; it IS Super Mario RPG, but with a bit of Mario & Luigi mixed in (like literally, from the start the boy has Geno Blast and the girl has the Mario & Luigi koopa shell). Unfortunately the numbers are all so fucked up that even if you're defending every enemy attack perfectly, you end up needing to heal constantly. Not to mention the hapless addition of tedious mechanics like live mana, which kinda just feel like an attempt to say they're totally not copying Mario RPG wholesale while adding virtually nothing of note of their own to the mix. Which is fine, I suppose, but the end result is something much less compelling than any Mario RPG I've ever played.

Really though, don't let the gorgeous pixel art fool you; under the hood Sea of Stars is a grey, formless sludge of an RPG that attempts to limply replicate games like Chrono Trigger and even non-video game media like Avatar: the Last Airbender, without really understanding what made those pieces of media work so well in the first place. I truly wanted to give this game a fair shake and at least appreciate it for what it is, but at only a few hours in, I'm already at the point of not being able to figure out a reason to keep going. There are so many more interesting games out there, especially within the RPG genre itself, that I could be getting an actual meaningful experience from instead.

There's plenty of well-written games out there. But it's rare to run into amazingly written ones. Games where just the prose, coupled with some great audiovisual presentation of course, can get you so deeply enthralled that you forget everything else and become a sponge, trying to absorb as much of its world as you can. Games where you feel like you everything you do holds its own little meaning.

Norco is one such game, but it's also imperfect, in many ways. None that are immediately apparent, Norco sounds, looks and reads great. But there's a couple things that feel like they don't belong. There's combat, for starters. You'll get in about... four, five fights in the whole game? They're all really easy and not a bother, it's just weird. The story feels oddly paced, disinterested in its main plot at first, only to become much more linear and fast-paced near the halfway point. There's still a good amount of things you can miss, but the freedom of choice that I really fucked with vanishes kinda quickly.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that the game's themes, as pointed out by others, don't feel as cohesive as they should. The first half of the game is clearly about modern society and capitalism, while the second is more spiritual and symbolic (with a long detour in the middle about cults, which I feel is the worst part of the game). Both of those two halves, taken individually, are executed in a pretty gnarly way, but when looked at in the context of a single story, I genuinely struggle to see a throughline.

And that's a damn shame, because I'm a loser who likes to feel smart, and when I don't "get it", I feel non-smart. It's hard for me to let go of the idea that every game needs to "mean" something. So, let's try, spoilers ahead. I think this is a game about trying to find your own purpose and how difficult and possibly fruitless it is in today's world. The protagonist's mother gives up her past as a free spirit to try and make some dough for her family in her last days. Million, the family robot, can't ultimately escape her programmed purpose (I think? She deserved a better conclusion man, she was so cool and then got killed off abruptly. A fucking crime I tell ya). The Garrets are all looking for some purpose in the most toxic way, first starting some cult and eventually just trying to shoot themselves into space. Superduck is a hive mind of gigantic proportions, bending nature to its will, and is punished with a horrible death. Pawpaw forces all of your family into some preordained Da Vinci Code religious bullshit, with your final action being to just escape from it. It's about trying to find a little bit of freedom in a world that that keeps applying a more and more suffocating stranglehold on to you.

Or you know, it's about something else and I just made all of the above up. Even if I'm right, I don't know if it's supposed to end on a more hopeful note, or a sour one. Norco hurts, because it's so close to being an absolute classic for me, so close to having just the right symbolism. Or maybe I'm the one who's so close to finding the perfect way to look at it to let it blow my mind as it deserves. I don't know.

"We're all trapped in this limbo. A long twilight that bleeds out to the edges of time where even the most fantastic things become banal. This grey blanket of stale time. Stagnant, lonely time. To puncture it... To punch a hole in it. I understand the appeal. I do."