Animal Well review: must-play Metroidvania is full of rewarding secrets

Unlike most games, you don't start with a map to help you navigate around in. Thankfully, you can find it in the very early stages of a playthrough as you start working your way around. is a unique Metroidvania,offering players plenty of puzzles to complete and many secrets to uncover.

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!

As an animator, Joaquim Dos Santos has steadily carved out a career boasting credits on some of the most influential American animated series of the past two decades. The 46-year-old animator and director has gone from directing episodes of Justice League: Unlimited and Avatar: The Last Airbender to co-directing one of the biggest animated features of last year: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes Score Details Pros

If there is one thing that people who make and play video games love more than video games, it’s labels. People love to label a game, to invent a genre, to categorize and sort and declare some kind of rudimentary ownership. YouTubers have built entire careers around this.

Animal Well is one of the hottest games around. It quickly shot to the top of Steam's top-seller chart after it was released to glowing reviews last Thursday.

One of the new ’s stand-out features should undoubtedly be replicated by other Metroidvanias. Playing through the strange, puzzle-filled world of can often be tense, but the intriguing triple-layer structure of the game is perfectly designed to draw people ever deeper into its world. has arguably quickly become one of the best Metroidvanias currently available to play, and its unique take on the genre will hopefully inspire future titles in turn.

This summer, we’re living in a brave new world. E3 is officially dead — for real this time. That means there’s a vacuum to be filled as publishers still look to showcase their games during high-profile events. There’s both good news and bad news for anyone who looks forward to E3 season. The good news? Summer Game Fest is filling that gap, alongside several streams that’ll orbit around it. The bad news? Keeping track of it all is a huge pain.

has a lot of secrets to discover and locations to explore, but this new indie game on PC, PS5, and Switch has one room in particular that's particularly useful if it's found early on. As an unusual take on the Metroidvania genre, is all about unique traversal methods and varied puzzles, so it's easy to miss important things by pursuing a different path. Although some of its secrets are intended to be nearly impossible to find in a normal playthrough, others are definitely designed to be ferreted out for the purpose of having a complete experience with the game.

The indie video game scene is one that lends itself almost naturally to the genre of the 2D Metroidvania. With a focus on playing repeated sections of the game world with new power ups to progress, it can be a good way for studios to show off interesting elements of game design with limited resources. Enter , from developer Shared Memory and publisher Bigmode, for something a little bit different.

Mind-bending puzzle metroidvania Animal Well just released yesterday, and already a community of players is tearing the game apart to find its many, many, many, many secrets. Right now, that includes a ridiculously complicated puzzle that requires at least 50 different people to participate. And just one day after launch, the community is on the cusp of completing it.

Whenever we recommend games at Digital Trends, we tend to go heavy on titles available on subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. Rather than telling our readers to buy new games, we always try to find ones that might be on services they’re already paying for. Still, that doesn’t cover every player. There are plenty of more casual gaming fans who aren’t subscribed to any service that offers extra games. We don’t want to leave them out, do we?