Animal Well Review (constantcompile)
Review after achievements completed: Animal Well
All the reviews I've seen about this game are either hyperbolically positive or straight-up memes, so let me be a joyless nerd and provide a more nuanced take.
Animal Well is a solid metroidvania with more than its fair share of puzzles and mysteries, none more baffling than how Billy Basso managed to cram all of it into a mere 40 MB. As with many modern puzzle games, there's a sort of exponential difficulty curve; the majority of the puzzles - certainly all that are required to beat the game - are pretty straightforward. Beyond that, truly completing the game, without resorting to a guide, will require an unreasonable amount of hours triple- and quadruple-checking every room on the map for something you missed, and comparing notes with at minimum several dozen of your friends to work out some ARG-level esoterically vague hints.
Mercifully, the truly capricious requirements - the speedruns, the deathless runs, what have you - do not have achievements tied to them. Still, this is a game that you should walk into with the expectation that you will eventually need a guide if you want to keep your sanity. "A traveler's guide to Animal Well" is great, with excellent use of spoiler tags.
I ding'd all of the achievements for Animal Well in a little under 16 hours - which is not to say I completed it. I resorted to the use of the aforementioned guide once I only had a handful of late-game collectibles left, because re-combing the whole labyrinth for where to use my third(!!!) incredibly situational niche item didn't strike me as a good way to spend my time.
If this doesn't strike you as a glowing review, that's because it isn't. Animal Well is definitely good! The thumbs-up is right there; don't come at me. I do like the novel takes on how your character's abilities improve; I recommend Supraland if you want more of those unexpected spins on familiar mechanics. I just didn't walk away from it with the ecstatic euphoria that seems commonplace in its reviews, whether because of the fiddly platforming or because of the aforementioned niche items.
Still, all that said - recommended.