Animal Well

A good metroidvania packed with puzzles, secrets, and challenging platforming—and no combat. It has distinct visual and audio design and a quirky, mysterious atmosphere. There is no handholding and much of the fun is in discovering on your own how to use tools and navigate the environment.

Difficulty is up to you ... kinda. You can "finish" the game with just moderately difficult puzzles, though note that you won't be able to avoid some challenging platforming, so if you hate that, then this game is not for you.

The bottom line is that these "basic" puzzles are excellent and very satisfying. Even when they are not too hard, just solving them is fun and cool and delightful.

But the optional secrets get much, much harder. Like, super extreme obscure detective work hard. People are still wondering whether we've discovered them all. And that's where the game gets less fun, at least for me. Combing the world for potential clues involves lots and lots of backtracking, basically trying every tool in your toolbox on every pixel on the screen. Actually, just getting to the "basic" ending will likely involve considerable tedium of this sort. After getting as far as I could, I turned to online guides and found that I had barely scratched the surface on my own. And even following the community-found solutions was tedious and frustrating.

There's definitely a group of players who considers solving very hard puzzles to be rewarding enough to be worth the frustrations. Indeed, one puzzle is designed to be only solvable through the collaborative efforts of such a community. Those people clearly had an amazing, rewarding time with it. But I imagine that the vast majority players would be more like me: I find it annoying that cool game content is basically inaccessible without getting out of the game and into the forums. The dev is even on record saying that he didn't think people would ever discover some of the solutions. This is just not what I was signing up for when I booted this combat-less metroidvania. I did not expect Myst.

OK, but still. If you are OK with not seeing everything, and/or looking things up, then there is so much to enjoy here. I had a good time with Animal Well and tip my hat to the dev for putting it together with so much passion and attention.