Animal Well: How To Unlock The Map

offers many puzzles and secrets for players, but many can only be discovered once you have unlocked The Bubble Wand. The new title has taken the genre by storm with unique gameplay that will keep you returning for more. However, you will need to venture through several rooms and complete multiple puzzles to access the game-changing Bubble Wand.

has four bosses, based in the four corners of the map, which can be challenged in any order, including The Seahorse Boss. You will need to beat all four of the bosses, unlocking their statues, to open up the route to the final area of the game. While they can be faced in whatever order you want, The Seahorse Boss is an enemy you should take on as early as you can due to the item it protects.

XDefiant is a fast-paced first-person shooter with a wide variety of gun types to choose from, giving you a ton of choices on how to build your loadouts. Whether you’re a run-and-gun kind of person or prefer to sit back and pop foes from afar, you’ll find that there’s something here that fits your playstyle. However, you’ll need to first unlock most of the guns by completing challenges, and some of them can require playing a specific way for a bit. When you’re ready to do that, here’s how to unlock every gun in XDefiant.

In , there are many different weapons and weapon types for players to choose from, and now there is a new weapon to find and unlock, the Whip. The Longbow and the Whip were both added with the newest update to the game, and players might have a tougher time unlocking the Whip, depending on their player level. Unlike many other basic versions of weapons, the Whip will not be available until the mid-game.

Breakout indie metroidvania Animal Well is one of the best games I've played so far this year. It's also by far the smallest, clocking in at just 38MB, but its developer says they "didn't do anything particularly clever" to get the game down to that size,

In a year already bursting with killer Metroidvanias to sink into, Animal Well managed to tower over its competition and became the year’s second-best-reviewed game when it came out earlier this month. Now, as players are mopping up the minimalist world's last remaining secrets, the game's creator is turning his gaze toward an Animal Well follow-up, which may or may not be a proper sequel.

In a year already stacking up plates of delicious indie game dishes so fast they’re toppling over and crashing onto the floor, spilling splattered food over the carpet to be hoovered up by waiting dogs/cats/raccoons/mice, Animal Well is one of the most generous helpings yet. The captivating, combat-free Metroidvania is rich with a delectable buffet of challenges, puzzles and secrets to find even once you’ve seen the credits roll. Still, players have chewed their way through its more-ish platforming and puzzle-solving much faster than its solo developer intended, it turns out. Luckily for us all, creator Billy Basso is already looking ahead to a new game set in the moody zoo-niverse - even if that’s not a complete sequel.

If you’re a puzzle game fan, you’ve had one heck of a month. Within a span of two weeks, two of 2024’s best puzzle games — or, simply, best games — were released with Big Mode’s Animal Well and Simogo’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. The puzzles couldn’t look or play more differently: Animal Well is a platformer that prioritizes environmental puzzles, somewhat like a Metroidvania, while Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a puzzle box disguised as a walking simulator, pulling together logic, math, physics, and language puzzles. And yet, both games are labyrinthian mazes with tons of mysteries and secrets; the way Animal Well gates off puzzles until you find a very specific item mirrors the way Lorelei and the Laser Eyes withholds a key piece of information until you’ve opened the right book or unlocked the correct door. For games that look nothing alike, the act of playing them — and solving their most mysterious puzzles — feels undeniably similar.

Many of the mechanics and systems of are deliberately not told to you as you play, making it hard to find and use important items like Firecrackers. Some enemies cannot be beaten until you obtain Firecrackers during your early adventures within the game. You'll need to avoid dangerous situations instead of getting into fights to figure out where these important items could be.

After countless runs throughout the Underworld in an attempt to defy the Titan of Time, nothing helps the protagonist of unwind like a hot spring. The hot spring is an incantation that Melinoe can unlock like any other to renovate the Crossroads. Perhaps most importantly, the heated pool can also help players woo a potential romantic partner.

With the surprise release of the highly-anticipated Hades 2 from Supergiant this week comes a flood of new gameplay and mysteries to explore; one such mystery is the newest weapon added to the Hades roster, the Argent Skull. This is arguably the most complicated of the new weapons at Melinoe's disposal, but before players can engage with the new combat style it offers, they have to unlock it at the Nocturnal Arms pool. Alongside the other weapons players are able to wield, the Argent Skull must be unlocked using location-specific resources, some of which require the player to push pretty far into the game's levels.

Surpise-hit indie Animal Well was released late last week and already seems to have trapped a sizable number of players with its gorgeous pixel aesthetic and world full of secrets to uncover. Despite being a single player game, one particular secret puzzle will supposedly require 50 players working in concert to solve. Warning: vague spoilers for a post-game Animal Well secret puzzle to follow!