Animal Well and the Esoteric Metroidvania

If you know, you know.

May, 2024. I’m binge-reading through all the coverage surrounding the new “it” game, Animal Well, and one word keeps getting used again and again. The word is an adjective often used to described the indescribable and quickly became the shorthand for writers trying to pin down the game’s idiosyncratic nature.

The word is “esoteric”. You can find its use within the copy of Kotaku’s Animal Well review. And The Escapist’s. IGN pulled it out twice for a news article on the game. Even I fell back on the dreaded “e” word for my own Animal Well listicle. And… also my other Animal Well listicle…

You get the idea. Animal Well is an esoteric game with esoteric puzzles born from the mind of an esoteric designer who wanted his game to thrive in its esotericism.

This article is one hundred percent getting penalised for keyword stuffing…

Two other important things to know about Animal Well:

1. It was my favourite game of 2024.

2. It gave me severe FOMO that, at times, made me resent the game.

Those two points may appear to contradict one another, but they’re actually two sides of the same coin. Animal Well is a puzzle platforming metroidvania with mechanics, design, and aesthetics that create a sense of surrealism intentionally hard to pin down. It’s awesome. It’s also unsettling. And occasionally frustrating. But, most of all, it’s esoteric.

If you’ve gotten this far into the article, it’s probably time I tell you what “esoteric” even means (if, unlike me, you haven’t been obsessing over this word since May last year). At the risk of sounding like the beginning of a bland best man’s speech, *ahem*, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “esoteric” is defined as: something being designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone.

In other words: if you know, you know. And if you don’t know, well… sorry. To be esoteric is to be exclusive. Something that only a select group of people truly understand or comprehend. The most inside of inside jokes. Held only for the enlightened. A secret to the masses.

You know what video game genre loves secrets? None other than everyone’s favourite gaming portmanteau: metroidvanias! However, I think it’s important to clarify that “esoteric”, while adjacent to, is not the same as “mysterious”. Because, while I think it’s safe to say that mystery is a core element of every metroidvania, esotericism is not.

Whenever you start a new metroidvania, you are placed in the middle of a world closed off by a series of locked doors. Sometimes this is in the form of literal locked doors that need opening with a key; more often you’re faced with an impassable obstacle—such as an enemy or platforming challenge—that can only be overcome after gaining the appropriate knowledge and/or piece of equipment. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s just call them “locked doors” and “keys”.

The mystery lies in what awaits on the other side of the locked door. Metroidvanias simply do not function if that human instinct for curiosity is not fuelled by a sense of mystery. And once you get passed one door, you’ll likely discover the key to another, and then another and another, unlocking each mystery until you are rolling the game’s credits. It’s a gameplay loop that is seriously satisfying when executed correctly and resulted in some of the medium’s most highly respected titles from a design point of view.

Esoteric goes a layer deeper. Remember, if something is esoteric, then it will only be comprehended by a specific minority. If only a small number of players can open an early locked door in a metroidvania, the developer is going to see a steep drop-off within the first hour of play time. Curiosity has its limits. At least, for the majority of people.

A good example of esotericism in a metroidvania is also perhaps the most famous video game secret of all time. While everyone knows about the Inverted Castle in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night now, back in 1997, the revelation that you could explore an upside-down version of the map if you didn’t defeat the not-so-final boss fight was mind blowing.

The problem? Anyone who missed out on this secret missed out on a whopping 50% of the game’s content. That’s half the game locked behind a door that requires an easy-to-miss key to open. It’s an over-reliance on obscurity cloaking what is otherwise a really cool twist. Because it’s hard to get curious about a mystery when you don’t know the mystery exists in the first place (I do feel compelled to note that Symphony of the Night is practically perfect in every other way <3).

This brings me back to Animal Well, the most esoteric of esoteric metroidvanias. For those who don’t know what this game is about, here’s a basic rundown: you play as an unnamed blob who spawns in a strange, subterranean world with nothing but four flames displayed on the map giving you any direction on where you should go or what you should do. Between you and those flames are a series of cryptic puzzles and platforming challenges where you may also encounter some rather ill-at-ease animals—many of whom have it out for your poor little blob.

Let’s circle back to the second thing I mentioned about Animal Well: namely, the FOMO aspect. Because the game does so little to explain what is going on or what you should be doing, my curiosity went into overdrive trying to wrangle any sense or reason from this surrealist world. I could tell there was something more to this game, I just didn’t exactly know what. What ate away at me was knowing others had already found the answers I was seeking.

From the day Animal Well launched, a dedicated online community sprung up to excavate the game’s secrets. Through the power of cooperation and a shared passion for the game, this community quickly made progress in illuminating the most hidden corners of this well. Locations of collectibles were discovered, complex puzzles were solved, new items were found, and even some potential lore was unearthed. If Animal Well is esoteric, and esoteric is something only understood by a small group of people, then this collective of tweeters and forum users took their place as the game’s inner sanctum of knowledge keepers.

It’s important to remind you that this was all happening across a matter of days. So, while I was still scrambling my way through my first “standard” playthrough of Animal Well, it already felt like the rest of the community had advanced so far beyond where I was that they were playing a completely different game. In other words, I was still using a Nokia when everyone else had moved on to smart phones.

This was all intentional. Billy Basso is the designer behind Animal Well and his vision for the game was for it to have several layers of playability. The first layer is a straightforward playthrough of the game’s main objectives and is what the majority of players will experience, with each subsequent layer diving further and further into the game’s secrets. Crucially, even if you only play the first layer, you are still in for an absolute treat as Animal Well is an excellent metroidvania regardless of your commitment to its more esoteric qualities.

Once I got out of my own head and stared focusing purely on the game in front of me, I found so much to love about Animal Well. It’s stunning pixel art that feels so expressive and moody and lush all at the same time. It’s unique selection of items and the even more unique ways that you use them to help overcome various obstacles. And how the world design means that even if you feel stuck, you probably just need to poke around in a different area of the map to find a new path forward.

It's such a great game. Might even say my favourite of 2024. After finishing my normal playthrough (the first layer) of Animal Well, I decided to give the other layers a try with the help of the game’s online community. I found it to be an incredibly welcoming space where all the players just wanted to help each other out in discovering all there was to know about this game we all loved.

I guess, at least in this case, esoteric can be inclusive.