Animal Well is absolutely completely utterly - fine! It's good! It's fun! I especially like its visual identity, though I don't love its soundscape too much. The puzzles are creatively designed and the tools you get for exploration were suprising and well utilized. Do I think there's much more here? No, not for me. I read the articles detailing the games' secrets and what I find disappointing that - so far at least - the game's secrets don't really add any lore or backstory or theme to its world, leading to the secrets feeling a little shallow to me. But I'm also not really the person to dig deep in this type of game - if you are, you're probably gonna like Animal Well way more. Maybe it also had the misfortune of releasing alongside Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which scratches that mystery solving itch waaay better - at least for me. Animal Well still is a cute game though that I will probably mostly remember for its outstanding visual design moreso than anything else.

I played the demo for this game and was blown away. It seemed like a fun take on a typing game, but when I got the full game the ideas presented to me in the demo just got vary arduous soon after the demo ended.

Cryptmaster is a dungeon crawler mixed with text adventure, with a typing game also. There are many puzzles and dialogue things where you can just type whatever you want, so things are very "open ended"(?) kind of? This could be cool, the allure of text adventure games is the freedom you could have from being able to "do anything", but that is the same allure that falls short in this game.

There are a lot of mechanics that feed into each other so I kind of just have to start explaining them all. Let's start with the memories of your 4 person party. At all times your party will have a blank word that will gradually fill up as you gain letters. Letters are gained from fighting enemies, doing riddles, or opening chests. The more letters you have, the easier you can guess the word, but you can type in the word anything once its the one on screen. These memories can either be lore, or moves to use in combat. There appears to be like 40-ish for each person, mostly consisting of lore from what I could tell. I beat the game and ended up with like less than 20 on each character.

Chests are puzzles in which you ask the Cryptmaster to describe a mystery item (look, touch, remember what it did, taste, etc.). Limited number of guesses, and when you solve it all the letters get put into your memory words. There are skulls that give you riddles to figure out, and similarly if you solve them, the letters get added. The problem with these is purely a chance thing where maybe none of the letters actually help you, or you already had those letters, just fucking annoying i think.

Fighting enemies gives you 1 letter of your choosing from their name, but I find the combat fucking annoying. The combat is recommenced to be in real time (more in line with most typing games), or you can do a version of turn based combat. In real time, you must type your moves fast while a timer counts when the enemy will attack. However, you have a cooldown after each move (per character), and this feels so ridiculously long compared to enemy attack speed. Also the fact you have to remember every move for 4 characters in a high speed fight, that was just not feasible for me, so I went to turn based. Turn based isn't traditional turnbased, it just makes every letter typed advance time. Enemy attack timer goes down per letter, and when a party member is on cooldown, each letter takes away a segment of cooldown. This slows it down so you can think and you can actually look at your list of attacks, providing more "strategy". Turn based was a band-aid to finish the game because I don't think the combat is good overall. I will say its mainly because the moves all kind of suck too. idk none of them felt really good to use, but maybe there are cooler moves i didnt unlock even though i beat the game! Maybe if I could get memory words faster, combat would be better, but even then combat just woudlnt be fun until "late game" so it seems not very good.

Then the other part of this game besides combat is the mystery object and riddles and boy FUCK do I hate word puzzles. I didn't think this game would be so full of them, so fuck me i guess. Im just not good at them. I can't solve riddles, and I cant remember words when I need to. Then it just pisses me off like really bad man. If you like word puzzles you might be happier than I!

Also, there is a card game in this, and I also think it sucks. Maybe thats just me not understanding how I should play it, or not understanding how to build a deck, but you dont get a lot of cards to even build one. Most cards you get from beating opponents, but you have to beat them with your crap cards.

The card game has you draw 4 cards, and a whole row of random letters (maybe like 20ish?). You pick 2 letters at a time, and if any of the letters are in the name of the cards in your hand, you deal damage. If you get all the letters in a card's name, its effect will happen. You can also skip your turn to mulligan your letters. This is heavily reliant on you actually getting letters you can fucking use in your hand, which I barely ever had. From what I could piece is that deckbuilding would revolve around either picking cards with a variety of letters so you can have more letters that are useful, or cards with a small variety so letters do more damage per pick. Again, you don't really get a lot of cards to do either of these I feel. Maybe I just fundamentally did not understand this card game, but I dont think its very fun at all.

Mainly just every mechanic frustrated me and it just did not gel with me, im sad it didnt, but oh well.

Man, this is a shame. Not because the game isn't good, but because it could have been even better than it turned out to be. Let me start with what I liked.

The art direction in the game is pretty fantastic, everything fits the setting, the trash from above littering the ocean combining with the organic environment is pretty masterfully done. The level design is pretty great as well, the levels feel well connected and with plenty to explore off the beaten path. The shell system and how it can also enhance your weapons was pretty cool, and definitely mixed up gameplay so things didn't get too same-y for the most part. The soundtrack isn't something i'd put in my playlist, but its definitely fitting for the game and it never put me off. The combat, while far from perfect(i'll get to that) is mostly good and I did enjoy the gameplay, bosses and enemies for the most part. Now to what I didn't enjoy

First of all, the map. Man, what the hell is this map? Its literally just a stagnant paper map that barely gives any information. You get some minor metroidvania like powers for backtracking and exploring, but the map really puts you off from doing so with how little it helps in the exploration. Next, the camera. Especially the lock on camera, which for some strange reason they decided to put giant black bars on the top and bottom when you locked on that really limit visibility. On top of that, its very easy for the camera to get slammed into the wall along with you when your pushed up against one, making combat during that kind of situation very annoying. Granted, dark souls has a similar camera but this game has more moments were your pushed against a wall in my experience. Next, the combat does have some occasional jankiness. On more than one occasion, after hooking an enemy or hitting a major attack after an enemys poise is broken, i would be sent into the air and either fall through the ground, or end up in a spot of the map i wasn't suppose to be. This also occasionally happened when an enemy attacked me up against a small object on the ground. Very frustrating and definitely ruined certain sections for me. I also found that the game overstayed its welcome for the final 25%. More than once, I found myself thinking "yeah this is the final boss" only for it to just not be and the game kept going, far after I completed the skill tree and had my build set, and it felt the game was crescendoing. It didn't help I found the story to be kind of not interesting? Its not that I didn't agree with a lot of the themes, but I've seen this kind of commentary done a million times especially in indie games at this point, and this game certainly doesn't do it better than the actual good ones. So for me the ending certainly dragged and I was ready to be done far before the end credits.

Another crabs treasure is far from a terrible game, but its also far from an exceptional one. Its certainly one of the better souls-likes not made by fromsoft, but its still riddled with issues that I find it hard to recommend outside of a decent discount.

Ended up a bit disappointed by this game. I loved the graphics, music, and new enemies that it brings to the series. The animations are incredible and it’s a huge step up from the New Super Mario Bros series. Kevin Afghani killed it as the new Mario.

However, I can’t say the same for the level design. There are a lot of good ideas here, but it results in most levels feeling gimmicky. Because of this, the game turns into more of a puzzle-platformer that keeps changing the rules on you. These kind of levels should be balanced out between regular ones, not the whole game.

The Wonder Seed level changes also don’t really live up to the hype. Some are awesome like the musicals and rideable ones, but there are some boring ones that just give you invincibility and some trippy visuals. I think they should’ve cut about half of them, and given us traditional (acrobatic-focused) Mario levels instead.

I hope that this is not the future of 2D Mario, because it may remove my interest in the series entirely. As a one-off game, it’s not for me, but it’s alright. Giving it a decent rating because the highs in this game are very high.