I'll be honest, I bought this for the hype, played for about 10 minutes and thought 'yeah, I'm probably refunding this'. Played a bit more, just to see where would it take me. Suddenly, I was waaaay past the maximum playtime to refund. I didn't want to refund anymore.

One of my favorite things about metroidvanias is never really feeling stuck. Somehow, you just keep going forward. If you hit a wall, you try a different path and continue. Animal Well is so rewarding in this regard, giving you a permanent feeling of progression, with new puzzles all the time. It remixes its mechanics to make every challenge feel like a novelty, and it's SO GOOD at letting you find out its secrets. You're likely to find out how some of the tools you get work by sheer luck or accident, making challenges you skipped thinking you didn't have the tool click. These tools never really work the way you expect. More accurately, they always work in an extra way that you didn't expect.

Everything is framed in a gloomy atmosphere aided by visuals and audio.

This is a very good game!

Yeah, I'm sad to say I'm not finishing this one.

The game, in most aspects, is pure genius. The booklet aspect of it is just an incredible experience to get through. Finding answers to questions you thought the game wouldn't bother to ask, and seeing them work. Recontextualizing the scenarios you've already visited several times with new knowledge. That feeling of "hey, this might work over there!". Often, without the use of any words.

This, however, is one of many games in recent times which have adopted the soulslike trend of revolving around struggle. Your struggle. In this case, I'm referring to its combat. It never felt good for me. Not because it is too difficult, but because it never feels satisfying. Your sword is too short, your dodge not long enough, your enemies' skin is too tough, yours is too feeble. I understand they want to give you a challenge, but I can't agree with the way they doing it. I understand the feeling of overcoming a challenge that other games, namely From Software games, give you. I beat every enemy in this game, except for the last phase of the last enemy, and not once did I find that here.

It just feels like everything the game can throw at you is a notch higher than it should be. I'm stopping at the final boss, I've made improvement and I'm almost there. I simply don't have much interest in replaying this fight until I learn how to defeat this enemy, because the only part that's left of this game for me, is the part I don't want to play.

Add to that a problem with its pacing, giving you a climax far too early in the game. The rest of my playthrough felt like crawling through the desert, hoping it would end soon.

I think most people will still enjoy this game. I enjoyed most of it myself.

Genuinely didn't expect to like this game as much when I was playing it for the first few hours, and was more or less certain that I would either push through it or shelf it. The story is difficult to follow, becuase it's told in a slow way for a very fast-moving game, making it difficult to stop and read. However, the ending felt really worth it, and I overall had fun with it. Visually and musically striking, it's level design is a bit chaotic and hard to read at times, but I recommend giving it a try. It could do without the collectibles, I think.