I cannot remember the last time a game burrowed so deep into my head like Animal Well has, so much so that I've played an honestly slightly-unhealthy amount of it in the last two days. Initially Animal Well seems like a charming, atmospheric, and highly creative Metroidvania, with a gigantic, gorgeously pixeled map, an emphasis on puzzles, platforming and exploration with combat only present in the loosest sense, a keenness to break past the usual genre trappings. If this is where your experience with Animal Well begins and ends then it will likely register as a very good entry in the Metroidvania genre, one that stands out from the crowd in a variety of enjoyable ways. If this already sounds appealing to you then stop reading this review, go fire up a copy of Animal Well, and consider reading the next paragraph once you're nearing the end of the main game.

You see, there's a lot more to Animal Well than you might initially see on the surface, and the rabbit-hole can go very deep if you want it to, echoing games such as The Witness, Fez and Tunic. To avoid dipping into actual spoilers I will simply say that the design here breeds an obsessive search for understanding within the right players in a way that I find very enticing. I've seen differing takes on the merits of the various secrets this all entails - some people complaining that the game's most obtuse secrets simply can't all be solved by any individual person on their own - but I adore when a game is able to take on a life of its own and make you desperate to see how deep it will all go (even as you can't necessarily find out the answer to that entirely on your own). To set expectations for those ready for this journey, the main game ("layer one") is very doable without any outside help, "layer two" is arguably doable without outside help (though I looked up my very final few percentage points of this for quality of life reasons), and "layer three" - by design - absolutely requires looking things up or collaborating with many others who are playing the game in order to be completed (though seeing what steps you can manage on your own is certainly rewarding).

Morbid curiosity got the best of me.

Echo: Benefits is a Carl X Flynn porn fanfic that the people at EchoProject liked enough to make canon. This was written by someone completely uninvolved in Echo's development and you can tell--the characterization of Carl and Flynn are both a little off, and a lot of the internal monologue here doesn't make sense for this point in the timeline (this happens vaguely somewhere in the year before Echo, so I feel like "the old friend group" wouldn't be something Flynn would be thinking about nearly as much). Lots of little weird things that crop up in the writing like that, which makes this not a very good entry to the really tightly written Horror Mystery Psych Drama energy of Echo. But that is not the point of Benefits, the point of Benefits is to be a porn fanfic.

I will give them this, though: Flynn definitely would be the type of dude to suck ass at Dark Souls, and Carl definitely would be the type of dude to say "I'm not gay" 5 minutes before sucking dick

no puedo negar que lo disfrute, pero solo por la narrativa y ver otro punto de vista de esta parte de la historia, el combate es una verga, esta muy desvalanceado y es o que te hagan mierda o una vez que le agarras el patron al enemigo lo haces mierda vos, se nota el bajo presupuesto y con la fecha en que salio siento que fue publicidad para la segunda temporada, pero bueno, realmente me parecio interesante en lo que es historia y como toca a los personajes, las novelas estas no me gustan solo la jugue porque lo regalo epic y porque invincible me gusta mucho y no puedo pedirle mucho a mi humilde net con la que ando ahora mismo pipipipi

(This log is for Build 24 of the game, it's still not complete and hence why I'm not giving this a rating or marking it as complete; things are bound to change long after I've written this)

The Smoke Room has a lot of baggage going in, being a prequel to Echo, a VN I played recently that I hold in extremely high regard and care a lot about. I'll just say that if you're taking a look at this game, you really should play Echo beforehand as parts of The Smoke Room are clearly written with the expectation that you already know about the town's secrets and mysteries, as well as the family history of several characters from Echo. While I say that however, The Smoke Room at the moment feels like a wholly different product with very different goals and approach to its writing, and they're ones that I honestly have really mixed feelings on. I'll fully admit to being disappointed that for being a prequel expanding upon stuff only hinted at in Echo, I was expecting something at least as grim and sinister as that game was, if not more so when considering the move backwards in time to 1915. What I had praised Echo for, being willing to go against trope expectations for the genre (and the likely playerbase who would've even been interested in playing it: furries) and delve into serious subject matters with genuine honesty and care, is not really as present in The Smoke Room. The Smoke Room has its grim and scary moments, but they're few and far between and does give into its tropey conventions and expectations.

A part of it I should have seen coming when considering the protagonist here, Samuel Ayers, is immediately introduced as a male prostitute. It's a core part of his identity and background, and his job is something that's relevant across the entire game and all four routes; it's the reason why he either already knows or meets the four other main cast members. Sex is an important and constant matter across the entire game, which is such a drastic difference compared to Echo which purposefully played with those conventions and didn't quite give in as easily with simple wish fulfillment with its cast of characters. I'd like to think I'm not a prude and can appreciate good looking dudes (which TSR is admittedly full of if that's your cup of tea), but it wasn't the reason I loved Echo so much and frankly it was anything but that. All four routes don't just have one sex scene, but rather multiple and I honestly just began to start skimming through most of them at a certain point because I just wasn't interested. They feel like fan service for the sake of having it save for a select few which are at least either genuinely heartfelt, or are eyebrow raising on purpose for plot reasons. I wouldn't mind so many of them if the game had something to say or make a point of like Echo did, or at least fully gave in knowing what it was.

But The Smoke Room just in general feels like a story that doesn't exactly have a clear idea of where it's going or what it wants to do so far. It wants to be a prequel to Echo and all of the baggage and expectations that comes with, it wants to have actual romance with its main cast, it wants to have supernatural creepy elements, it wants to be murder mystery, it wants to be a political thriller; it wants to be so many things at once but just hasn't exactly found the right balance it needed to make it all work cohesively, not to mention the issues with tone trying to make all of those genres work together. Several moments in William's route has you witnessing some incredibly harrowing things, but then the next moment William's notebook has goofy doodles that completely deflate the moment along with unfitting cartoonish music that only raises more questions (why does the town sheriff both have the time to make these doodles, and why like the way they are if he's meant to be a serious professional?). So much of the supernatural horror stuff that made Echo so interesting are weirdly absent for most of the routes, save for very brief single scenes like in William or Murdoch's routes, but then Cliff's route has it prevalent across the entirety of his route (or at least what's available right now). What's the point of giving Samuel such a significant personal hurdle to get over, the fact that even though it was in self-defense, he murders somebody within the first 10-20 minutes of the game and haunts him across every route, if every route the characters immediately forgive him and the game just kind of shrugs it off and not really bring it up again?

It's difficult to really put down exactly what's so off about The Smoke Room for me. There's a lot that TSR does get right and drastically improves upon compared to its predecessor, notably with just general production quality across the board. The art is not only much more consistent in style, but higher in quality and with more unique CGs for specific scenes. The music feels a lot less free stock-y than Echo did, with some of the more somber and tense tracks being outstanding when they come up in-game. More of the dialogue choices in TSR, while we don't have exactly know of how many of them are actually going to change things later down the road, at least in the moment feel more meaningful because there's entire small scenes you can completely miss if you don't go back to at least check the other option(s). The very brief pockets of horror that TSR does have are fantastic and I can only hope more of them are coming as the routes begin to slowly reach their big breaking point. The main cast does have some endearing qualities beyond just looking pretty, and Cliff and Murdoch especially have personal histories that are incredibly intriguing in a way that makes me genuinely curious where the game's going to go with them. But as I say all of that, I still put down this build of The Smoke Room disappointed coming off of my time with Echo. I'm not giving up on this game and am excited to see where it goes from here, but I really hope that with the ridiculous amount of time the game has spent building up little details and plot elements, that it will actually do something with them.

Adastra feels like exactly what it is; a much more lighthearted side project written to take a break from writing the literary behemoth that is Echo. Sure, lighthearted for EchoProject still includes a handful of emotionally distressing scenes, but they're in a much lesser number, intensity, and frequency when compared to something like Echo. In fact, I feel like this story is missing or weaker in a lot of the aspects I find particularly intriguing about Echo, but that kind of feels like that's the point?

Adastra strikes me as something that's more accessible to a furry audience than Echo, but way, way less accessible to a general audience. Dating the buff, half-naked (and sometimes fully naked) wolf man is kind of 'The Point' in Adastra--the Itch pages say as much; Adastra is described first and foremost a romance VN, and Echo a horror VN. This is a narrative goal, of course, that is going to appeal wayyy more to furries, and so if you liked Echo in spite of its presentation, I probably wouldn't recommend this one to you for the handful of scenes that remind me most of that game.

But does the game deliver on this goal? Generally, yeah, but I still can't help but feel disappointed in how predictable the arc of everything is, an aspect I don't think I'd ever ascribe to Echo. Sure, there's romance drama and royal drama but it's not very difficult to see the vague direction of where the story is headed, even if the path towards it is blurry at times. The political story almost feels a bit Shakesperean, and I don't really mean that as a compliment; it feels very telegraphed and theatrical, if that makes any sense. The heavy usage of Greco-Roman aesthetics and focus on royal power dynamics certainly doesn't help with that.

I wish the sci-fi elements were a bit more present. The world building is cool, and there's a decent amount of bits we get of it, but the story doesn't really start indulging in it until well past the half way mark. Aside from that most of it just feels like an explanation for the Isekai to happen, and such a vast majority of the story happens exclusively in the palace that it's pretty easy to forget that you got to this planet in a space ship that could shorten time and space in front of itself, even with the presence of Com. Just feels like a missed opportunity imo.

There are honestly a lot of missed opportunities in Adastra. I wish the MC wasn't so blank-slate. I wish we saw more than a couple of sapient races, since the game brings up the fact that there's probably, like, hundreds of them. The sex scenes feel, gratuitous, I guess? Like you could replace most (not all, but most) of them with a fade to black and not really miss anything. But I have to remind myself what the 'goal' of this VN is in the first place and that a lot of people are going to be coming to this specifically for those scenes. No wonder it's got twice as many ratings on itch compared to Echo.

I personally liked Adastra despite my issues with it, but I'm in, or at least, pretty close to, the target demographic here. I can't really see anyone too far from it getting anything out of this like I could see with Echo.

Ultimately, Adastra almost feels a bit too polished, and in that, becomes a little too reserved, like it's got all of its harsh edges sanded off. Echo is radical and experimental, it feels like a truly forward thinking piece of media. Despite having much more graphic sexuality than Echo ever does (and outnumbering its sex scenes in a third of the time), Adastra feels like it plays it a little too safe, at least as far as you can for a gay furry VN. There are hints, glimpses of something outstanding here, and there are a few scenes that I'd say cross into that, but largely Adastra is "pretty good escapism (only applicable for a small demographic) but not super notable." Not a bad place to end up for a video game, but seeing what Echo was just makes me wish this was so much more.