Billy Basso spent seven years building a hole in the ground. Animal Well is that hole, and it is deeper than it looks. The game came out in May 2024 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows, then reached Xbox Series X|S in October. It was Basso’s first solo work, made under the name Shared Memory, published by Bigmode as the label’s first release. It is a 2D Metroidvania about a yellow blob in an underground labyrinth, and it is one of the best games of 2024.
Trailer, via Billy Basso.
A yellow blob climbs out of a flower
You control an unnamed blob creature. It emerges from a flower at the start. No goal is given. No plot, no backstory, no text telling you why you are here. The world is a sixteen by sixteen grid of underground rooms, one visible at a time, connected into a labyrinth with both obvious and hidden links between them.
The rooms are murky. Overgrown, crumbling architecture. Machines and controls left behind by someone. Animals much larger than you.
The blob can walk and jump. That is the whole moveset at the start. Everything else arrives as an item.
A slinky, a frisbee, a bubble wand
The items in Animal Well are toys. A slinky. A frisbee. A bubble wand. Each one has multiple uses, and not all of them are obvious when you pick it up. This is the design idea the entire game rests on: Basso invented mechanics and derived puzzles from how they interact, and you feel that in every room.
The game never explains which use is which, and it never needs to.
There are firecrackers, collected at points in the game and thrown to scare animals or banish ghost animals until you leave the room. There are matches, placed in specific locations to permanently banish ghosts from that room. The distinction between temporary and permanent is the kind of thing Animal Well makes you work out yourself.
Four hearts and a pink fruit
Animals and ghosts may ignore you or harm you, passively or actively, depending on the creature. Take a hit and you lose one of your hearts. You start with four. Eating a pink fruit restores them. Up to four additional blue hearts can be gained by eating blue fruits.
That is the entire survival system, and it is enough. Animal Well is not a hard game in the way its genre usually means.
Secrets leading to more secrets
The pitch for Animal Well is that there is more than what you see, and the game means it literally. Portions of the world can only be reached with specific items. Many areas hold hidden elements that require items to access. Some puzzles require groups of players working in collaboration. Some require several playthroughs.
This is where Animal Well separates itself from the Metroidvanias it will be compared to. The genre’s standard promise is that a locked door opens when you find the right upgrade. Animal Well keeps that promise and then keeps going, layering secrets under secrets until the map you thought you understood turns out to be the surface of something else. The game’s own framing is a photograph you keep zooming into: the closer you focus, the more the world betrays.
Basso designed the aesthetics around gardens and urban areas near Chicago, plus his own artwork. You can feel the garden.
Seven years, one person, one engine
Basso built all of it himself, including the underlying engine. He planned the game as he made it. After four years he brought in Dan Adelman to handle marketing. A year later he signed with Bigmode, after YouTuber Jason Gastrow, known as videogamedunkey, saw Animal Well at a festival.
That is an unusual path. Animal Well does not feel like a product assembled to a spec.
It released to critical acclaim, particularly for its aesthetics and its layered puzzles, and appeared on several lists of the best games of 2024. It won Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction. Metacritic’s published critical score is 9.1/10.
What actually matters here
The firecrackers and matches are the clearest example of how the game teaches. One banishes a ghost until you leave. The other banishes it for good. The game hands you both and says nothing.
A game built by one person that requires groups of players to solve its deepest layers is a strange and generous thing, and it is the reason Animal Well will still be talked about when the 2024 release calendar is a footnote.
The one real complaint is that the game gives you nothing to hold onto at the start. No goal, no plot, no backstory. That reads as coldness until the labyrinth starts to feel familiar. By then you are not exploring a world. You are probing one.
The hard numbers
- Release: May 2024 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows; October 2024 for Xbox Series X|S
- Developer: Billy Basso, as Shared Memory
- Publisher: Bigmode (its first published game)
- Development time: seven years, solo
- Genre: Metroidvania; puzzle-platformer
- World size: sixteen by sixteen grid of rooms
- Modes: single player
- Metacritic critical score: 9.1/10
- Award: Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction
Where this leaves us
Animal Well is the rare game that justifies its own secrecy. It withholds a plot and gives you a slinky instead, and the trade is worth it. The visuals are lovely but they are not the point. The puzzles are the point, and the puzzles go deeper than the room you are standing in.
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