A low-key indie game from solo developer Billy Basso, Animal Well shot up to far greater notoriety when it was acquired by popular YouTuber videogamedunkey's new independent publishing company Big Mode. Through dunkey's earnest hype over the last year and a half, his massive fanbase were ready to explore the latest well type game.

Animal Well is receiving praise for playing. Right off the bat I appreciated how well optimized this game was for PC. Somehow it only takes about 30 MB of space, and didn't heat up my gaming laptop at all so I could comfortably play on my lap in bed without a stand. That set-up worked out great, because for the bulk of its initial runtime, Animal Well is the cozy atmospheric sort of exploration platformer that's really nice with headphones on and lights off.

The visuals and sound design are immediately striking. Between the gorgeous environmental art style and neat visual effects, along with really excellent foley effects throughout the whole experience, it's an easy game to just vibe out to. Every sound effect is really satisfying and new screen delightfully unique.

The gameplay has been called Metroidvania by many but without traditional content. I was a little trepidatious when the game left me to my own devices for fear of getting totally lost in the rooms and not sure where to go next, but the world design of this game is coherent and varied enough that I never really felt that way. You'll eventually Animal Well basically has a "central area" that at any time is fairly easy to get back to, and which you can branch off from on various exploratory journeys to the four flames you are looking to collect in order to unlock the final area.

You play as a little blob guy who jumps through the environment and along the way you'll encounter various animals of both the hostile and helpful variety. Some are cute and some are downright creepy, with some poltergeist-esque creatures lurking at various spots around the map. Discovery is the name of the game in Animal Well and I enjoyed seeing the various creatures calling this labyrinth home.

As you make your way through Animal Well, you'll pick up various new tools that will help you reach new areas and which also introduce new puzzle mechanics. There are a lot of traversal brain-stumpers as well as various button and lever puzzles which are fairly intuitive. At times this sort of puzzle was growing a bit tedious for me, but overall they generally aren't so difficult as to be very frustrating for long. I appreciated how (with a few exceptions) the game generally is careful not to let you get too deep in any one direction before you have the necessary tools to tackle its challenges.

The difficulty starts to ramp up near the end of the game, where your platforming abilities and prowess with switching tools and using them effectively and quickly is put to the test. I could particularly stuck on the ghost dog (cat?) segment for a good while, easily the most frustrating and difficult portion of an initial playthrough. I really thought this part of the game asks a bit too much of the player dexterity wise. I was playing on keyboard (not the recommended way to play) so I was fumbling with the keys a bit, but even so this section is ruthless and requires patience and trial-and-error under pressure which wasn't fun for me.

I also wasn't very impressed with the final area of the main game, with a freaky final boss that is rendered unthreatening by an item you pick up right at the end. Of course, Animal Well knows lots of players will be interested in its copious post game content and I'm sure it offers bigger challenges there. It's cool that players who wish to scour every inch of this world will be rewarded greatly for doing so, but there's also an ending and credits roll in place for players who just want to see the game's main ideas and have a solid 6-8 hour adventure.

Animal Well is a strong first published title for Dunkey and an impressive feat for Billy Basso, whose hard work and loving craft for the game over many years makes it something special and unique. While I had my frustrations with Animal Well in some of the later areas, it was still a very fun time and an easy recommendation.

5/10

I don't dislike the over-the-top and cringey clash between the fantasy setting and the young present-times protagonist. I mean, it's fun and enjoyable after all, not to mention that it plays with some tropes I honestly enjoy.

The thing is that some elements here and there aside almost nothing else works here: it's so generic that feels almost unplayable after a few hours.

i absolutely love animal well. i was expecting to enjoy it, but really i wasn't prepared for just how magical it feels. the map is incredibly dense, the puzzles are intuitively designed and have a great sense of accomplishment, the boss fights (which i wasn't expecting at all) are actually really creative puzzle fights, which i usually dislike.

my only MAJOR complaint is that it does feel a bit railroaded at times, a lot of areas deliberately prevent you from sequence breaking, which is something i find annoying. but other than that, just a ridiculously good game.

I decided on this warm summer night that I'd rot/enlighten my brain with some early 2000s Flash games, but this thing caught my eye and didn't let go of me until I'd beaten it. This is one of the best puzzle games I've ever played. The medium of Flash was inundated with Escape the Room-type games for years but, like the guy who found that one fungus what turned out to be penicillin, I feel like I found the first good one.

As you might guess from the genre, you're trapped in a room and a series of puzzles lies between you and escape. Apparently the person who made this spent 3 years crafting these puzzles, and it shows. They largely test your ability to recognise patterns, to take seemingly disparate pieces of information and make the one connection between them needed for solving. Even if this takes place in a lovingly 3D rendered environment which makes absolutely no practical sense, there's just enough logic in your surroundings and the pieces given to you to make the moment of solving so satisfying. Not too obtuse, not too simple, a nice curve of difficulty all the way to the end. This is a real pen and paper, logic it out, meat and potatoes, dick in the vagina, cheddar cheese and chicken tikka masala type game. MS Paint and Snipping Tool are also invaluable. None of the extra tools needed feel like a chore though, and the thing that impressed me the most was that, after some work, my logicking was often correct. That's not even me grasping at whatever vestiges of intelligence I have left after years of brain misuse, it's a compliment to how the puzzles lead you along and verse you in the language of this strange place.

The difficulty is interesting because I know the puzzles were getting harder in isolation, but also somewhat easier in context of the whole game. I felt I was getting better at understanding how the creator's mind worked to make this, their sensibilities and which pieces of information were important and which were noise. Getting across a real sense of authorship and artistry like that over a few hours of puzzling is no mean feat.

I also love how the game looks and how it's laid out. Each area has this bizarre sense of place; it could easily exist but also never could. Dream logic leaning more towards logic but dragging the dream along with it. All the materials feel and look so right, and the sound effects are your only companion in discovery, success, or failure. It's a joyously tactile game and a sensory delight throughout.

This thing I found randomly on a Wednesday night has catalysed a whole new interest inside me for this type of puzzle game. Three hours of Danny DeVito looking into the camera, saying "Oh my God, I get it" in Impact font. Maybe I should try Myst. The world is my lobster.

One of my favourite things to do is play a short indie game on a whim without knowing anything about it. I did this for Indika and boy did it pay off.

Indika takes a fascinating approach to making a cinematic narrative game feel fresh and exciting. It's quite unlike most other narrative "walking-sim" style games I've played. Indika uses the medium of video games to tell it's story better. It's hard for me to say how it achieves that without outright spoiling it, but it's doing some pretty cool stuff. That also extends to the game's general tone. Indika feels like it's going back and forth between being a serious commentary on religion to presenting itself as outright goofy and more of a satire. Sometimes this works. But other times, it can feel jarring. And I imagine this to be the intent as it's often effective. I just can't help but feel the absurdist elements of the game could have been pushed even further.

I enjoyed the story that's being told here. There are some pretty interesting discussions about religion and morality throughout the game that stuck with me. This is helped by strong VA from the leads. I'll also add that this game has some cool alt-history lore stuff (massive fish!!) that add a unique flavour to the game's world. Fun stuff.

Indika isn't without the mundane though. For all the cool and unique stuff the game brings to the table, you're still pushing boxes and solving sometimes outright mediocre puzzles. There's also a few of the standard walking sections where, as a player, all you have to do is push up on the analog stick. Stuff like that still feels archaic here, but I didn't mind it too much considering how strong the rest of the game is.

I enjoyed Indika a lot for what it was. And even more than that, I appreciate it for doing things differently. This is an extremely unique entry in the pantheon of Walking Sims out there. Definitely worth a look.

Simogo's breakthrough game Year Walk infuses Swedish folklore, horror, and puzzles into a rapid experience whose atmosphere and, later, dread are significant precursors to the later games to follow. There's almost too minor a feeling to the game after its quick runtime (both playthroughs), yet the work embodies a combination of visual, aural, and intellectual delights which put it nigh close to the mobile game Florence, which remains my favorite mobile title. Sometimes a memorable hour is better than the gap-filled hours, tens or hundred, which accompany most work in this medium.

En muchos aspectos, Scanner Sombre es el encuentro final entre el juego de terror de los 2010 basado en Amnesia y el first person walker. Tras un intento muy banal de asustarte que se siente burdo y basado más en ruidos fuertes que en una auténtica evocación de oscuridad, el juego se te revela como un viaje personal que no se aleja mucho de Dear Esther. Bajo este prisma, el viaje inverso que realizamos de la cueva se nos revela menos como un recorrido de exploración y descubrimiento personal y más como una tortura infinita, sin secretos que descubrir o placeres que experimentar. La narración seca y aséptica se encarga de contártelo todo sin tapujo alguno.

Si en todos estos aspectos Scanner Sombre se me antoja poco trabajo e incluso contrario a los sentimientos que trata de evocar, la tecnología de exploración y descubrimiento del mundo me parece demasiado bella como para no destacarla. Sin las incomodidades mecánicas de Unifinished Swan, el simple hecho de colorear la cueva ofrece una alegría innegable, y el juego es consciente de ello en todo momento. Una obra que se hubiera centrado más en esto me hubiera parecido mejor.

-----------------

In many ways, Scanner Sombre is the long-awaited meeting between the 2010s Amensia-based horror game and the first person walker. After very trivial attempts to scare you that are based more on loud noises than a real sense of dread, the game reveals itself as a personal journey that doesn't stray too far from Dear Esther. Through this, the reverse journey we take from the bottom upwards is less a journey of personal discovery and more endless torture, with no secrets to uncover or pleasures to experience. The dry and aseptic narration makes sure to tell you everything without any mystery whatsoever.

If all these aspects Scanner Sombre do little to convey the feeling that the game wants to evoke, the mechanics of exploration and discovery are by far the most beautiful aspect of it. Without the awkwardness of Unfinished Swan, the simple act of coloring the cave offers an undeniable joy, and the game is aware of this throughout. A title that focused more on this would have seemed better to me.

The strength of a good Halo campaign is in its pacing and this one has none; Halo is not a game where I want to be staring at a map trying to figure out how to navigate around some canyon or whatever.

As far as I can tell they got nothing right with this open world. None of the locations are memorable and 90% of the map is just open green fields with a few rocks and copy-and-pasted bases. Then you finish some meaningless checklist objective and some Hanna Barbara cartoon villain shows up to tell you how he really hopes he made you sad. This isn't just a bad Halo campaign, it's so bad it drags the whole series down with it: Before Infinite, Halo was a great series with some weak entries. After Infinite, Halo is a bad series with an uncharacteristically great first game.

Fear the Moon is a indie horror game developed by one guy named
Jonny's Games. You play as Jane who is invited by her friends to a camping trip deep in the forest of Ohio. But quickly she will notice that they are being stalked by a beast and that they have to do whatever it takes to survive the full moon.

I'm huge fan of anything related to horror, I've said that many times now and I'm an even bigger fan of the werewolf myth. Weirdly enough there aren't many movies surrounding werewolves nowadays. It's crazy because if you compare it to the vampire myth were it is completely different. So I'm glad that a game like Fear the Moon exists and the best way to describe it is probably the Puppet Combo games. The VHS vibe work well with the great atmosphere and because of this the game keeps you on edge the whole time. There are also a few small puzzles which were fun and the story served it's purpose. Overall a fun horror game, I can really recommend it if you just want a fun short horror game with 1-2 hours playtime with a creepy atmosphere and of course the werewolf was a huge reason why I enjoyed this game so much.

Games I finished in 2024 Ranked

Platinum Trophies Exhibition

This is how a spiritual successor should be done, for the most part.

Taking massive inspiration from early Resident Evil games, Crow Country feels strangely comfortable. There's something so soothing about the Resident Evil formula TM. The gameplay loop of exploring a slowly expanding environment via puzzles and light combat just works so well for me. And Crow Country does a great job at it.

I ended up also enjoying the simple story they go for here quite a bit. It's nothing crazy but it's fun and interesting throughout.

I do think that the game is maybe a bit too easy. Even finding the secrets isn't crazy difficult. I also wasn't a huge fan of the RNG bonus loot mechanic. I get that it's there to make sure players can't accidentally screw themselves over by running out of items. But it feels a bit too generous in a game that's already on the easier side.

Any fan of the old-school RE games needs to give Crow Country a play.

i owe you an apology miyazaki, i wasnt really familiar with your game

i have learned to love dark souls. the atmosphere is great, the way the world is connected is amazing, and i love the combat system. almost everything is amazing, except lost izalith which is the worst shit ever.

o&s and gwyn are awesome. pretty much every boss is. excellent game.

Lovely aesthetic, interesting story, golf sucks.

God damn this game actually made me more frustrated than Getting Over It or Jump King. The golfing felt so wrong. The ball would either fly way too far, or barely move at all - it didn't feel like I had control. And yeah you have to wait ages after each shot for your guy to fly over to the ball. Oh, I also switched to story mode early on because I was playing this for a video. Gameplay was still super annoying though.

I liked the idea of the radio and thought it was implemented pretty well. But at times the storytelling could be a bit overwhelming. There were fragments of the story told under each level name (which were in the same font, making things extra confusing), there were also the diary entries, and then there was the radio which played constantly over the top of these other things, which made it really hard to focus on reading anything.

Yeah idk the golfing just made me wanna rip out my hair

Fun game! I just need to talk to whoever thought it was a great idea to lock saving behind the sleeping mechanic on Survival difficulty.

To put into perspective why this is an abhorrent design decision made by absolute fucking dumbasses who couldn't tie their shoes, even under the threat of gunpoint, you have to consider:

- This is a Bethesda game. Halfway through the tutorial on this most recent playthrough, my game crashed. Imagine being halfway across the map and you haven't saved in a while. While this sort of thing is true for any game that withholds saving like this, it simply isn't acceptable when the scope of your game is so large that these sort of technical hiccups are more inevitable than anything else.
- The combat mechanics and scenarios were evidently not built around this. To give a lesser example, the warehouse you have to clear to get to Diamond City requires a significant amount of cheesing if you want to see it through, and this is only expedited and compounded when you step outside and have to deal with multiple snipers. To give the most textbook example of this, one of the very first quests in Fallout 4 has you dealing with a Deathclaw. This Deathclaw only gets spongier with each progressive difficulty option, and by the time you've turned Survival on, can easily one-shot you. Given that you have to fight a litany of raiders before this encounter begins, you already start the fight with reduced resources. Unless you chose to pick off the remaining raiders with the laser musket the game hands you before you decide to pick up the minigun, good luck running around the second you have to reload that minigun. The only way this fight is even remotely fair is if you cheese it by going back inside the building you came out of, running back up to its roof, and "stealth killing" it from the roof while it runs around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find you. The big issue with this approach is that it drains you of your ammo for the minigun, seeing as there's no real chance that you're getting a clean shot on that thing while it's moving around. Seeing as you'll probably need that minigun if you want to have a fair fight in places like the aforementioned warehouse, this is less than optimal. Once again, this is one of the first quests in the game. It would hardly surprise me if they didn't test this thing, that's how poorly thought out this is.
- One of the enemy types in this is a mole rat that will suicide bomb you. If you're lucky and have enough distance from one, this isn't a problem. But if even a single one of those things surprises you, you better start hoping your last save was recent.
- If you're playing on PC, none of this is an issue! Just install a mod that allows you to customize the rules to whatever you're comfortable with. If you're playing on a console, in particular anything PlayStation-related, you're shit out of luck.

What I love about Survival difficulties in games like these is that they force you to engage with the minutiae of the game's world. Having to actually scout for empty bottles so you can pour water into them is far more compelling than using what would be that water for boring, barely noticeable stat bonuses on regular difficulties. In this regard, Fallout 4's survival mode adds a nice layer to an already pretty fun game. But good lord, unless you're in a situation where you can circumvent the baffling decision to restrict saving in this way, I can't recommend it. Unless you're already halfway through the game, it makes the game nearly unplayable, and I'm not mincing my words here. It's genuinely that bad.