Bruno Dias

felt the EXACT same way

Yeah it's def a mixed bag. I didn't have problems with the precision platforming but the deeper puzzles get absurd pretty quickly

1. Cheat Engine's slowdown is your friend
2. While you go back to the last phone if you die, pretty much everything you've acquired remains acquired (with a few confusing exceptions)

i’m envious of the reviewers who got it a month early and got to have that “discovering the game’s deeper secrets together” experience but that perspective absolutely overhyped the game

i played to credits and then looked up all the secrets bc i knew that it was built for a community to access any of it (literally, one puzzle requires data from 50 people)

yeah, I've been enjoying it on the whole but the multi-screen-no-checkpoint-fiddly-platforming thing turns segments that could have been a fun challenge into an exercise in frustration, especially with how much it expects you to backtrack and re-run areas you've visited.

I've felt like there was something really wrong with me that I wasn't getting out of the game what others apparently do, but this perfectly describes the trajectory I took with the game and, especially, the lack of sanity checks within the game to indicate whether or not the tedious, difficult trick you're trying to pull off is even the intended solution.

I enjoyed what it was, but I spent the back half of the game remembering that I never played La-Mulana 2 which probably does the best things here better (if it's like the first one)

I think you open the way past the ostrich by hitting the buttons in the tunnels underneath it, and then you break the big wheel that's powering the moving platforms in the area and it rolls off towards the ostrich and kills it or scares it off or something. No idea if I'm remembering any of that correctly.

It goes away once you defeat the one in the big hamster wheel.

As for being used to similar games, idk if it ruined it for me per se. I loved the game, but I wish it had a main twist. As it is it's more a collection of nice surprises and ideas. I think what impresses me the most with Animal Well is its structure and systems, while sometimes games tend to be a little arbitrary with their secrets. Or like in Tunic's case, the secrets are almost an entire different game that doesn't interact with the combat parts.

But yeah I can definitely see people being way into this (or similar games like Void Strangers or Lorelei) and loving it even more because it's one of their first experience with something like that.

Like you said in another comment with notes, Animal Well was just a few screenshots for me, and some scribbles on the map. Lorelei, which people have talked about a lot like a game where you constantly take notes was two pages, and most of it was just convenience to avoid menuing.

Thanks for this thread from the selfish perspective of writing 6000+ words on the design of these games and how accessibility as a concept intersects, seeing what exactly people get frustrated with is (unfortunately) very helpful for me. 😅

It really could broadcast how hard the platforming might get (though, I would say is all easier than beating something like Celeste), but it has a weird structure where many parts of the game have no hazards at all most of the time or have minimal platforming. I actually got confused when someone told me they were dying at the start because the first quadrant I did, it was nearly impossible to die in most rooms. One could also say that about ALL of its features and mechanics -- it has so many pieces in there, and for someone who likes most of those pieces, it's awesome, but any one of them might piss any player off or be a line too far.

I thought the crit path was a 9/10, though, so it was mostly working for me. The parts that pissed me off were a few eggs and the highly inaccessible layers past that. I had the same exact feeling of hype and excitement and curiosity, I was specifically hoping I'd be able to unravel a lot more of it organically from just playing smart, but the truth is there's a lot of stuff in there that is basically "thinking outside of the game you're playing" and all the things I hoped were interactive in a cool way actually were interactive in a deeply obscure way.

Personally I didn't have any trouble with the platforming, so I must be better at that stuff than I'd thought. What did eventually bring me down was all the pixel bitching required to find a lot of the collectables. There's a few late game items that very obviously tell you "now you have to wander around the whole map again but using this item on everything". And that might even be fun if it opened up a bunch of new interactions, but for a lot of these items there seem to be only 2-3 rooms where they have any effect.

I think the game would have benefited a lot if it drew a clearer line between the core content and the stuff that's strictly for the puzzle-masochist freaks.