Animal Well Earns Strong Metacritic Score After Rave Reviews

If you haven’t been keeping up with Animal Well from Shared Memory and Bigmode, you may want to pay it a bit of attention now that it’s out with quite the Metacritic score to vouch for it. Animal Well is currently sitting quite comfortably on Metacritic at a score of 91 with every single review that the game’s gotten there giving Animal Well an 80 or above. For those who’ve now been convinced after seeing praise like that, the game is also either on sale or totally free depending on where you’re planning on playing it.

This 91 on Metacritic holds strong after 18 reviews, most of which were scored with several of them giving the game perfect 100s. Full of puzzles and animals in a well, Animal Well has so far been praised for its 2D-pixel art style as well as the layout of the game’s labyrinthian structure and its puzzles within. While not always explicitly stated in these positive reviews, it’s worth pointing out that the game’s developed by one person, Billy Basso, so the fact that it looks and plays as well as it does only makes it that much more impressive.

If you’re more of a chart person, Animal Well is currently sitting at the No. 5 spot on Steam’s bestsellers list right between Helldivers 2 and Gray Zone Warfare, so not a bad spot to be at all for an indie game that just launched. All that said, what do you actually do in Animal Well?

What Is Animal Well?

Based on what’s been said about the game so far, it’s best to go into it without knowing much about the story, but the game’s Steam page offers at least a little preview of what Animal Well is so you can see if the Metroidvania is your speed. 

“Explore a dense, interconnected labyrinth, and unravel its many secrets. Collect items to manipulate your environment in surprising and meaningful ways,” a preview of the game offered. “Encounter beautiful and unsettling creatures, as you attempt to survive what lurks in the dark. There is more than what you see.”

The launch trailer above shows off more of this pixel art style that so many people have been praising in their reviews.

Animal Well is out now for the PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Steam platforms, and if you’re buying it on the last of those two, you’ll find that it’s 10% off of the normally $24.99 price right now. If you’ve got PlayStation Plus Extra, you can also play this game for free, too. 

Bigmode, the publisher of Animal Well, is the company set up by Dunkey to publish indie games like this one. Animal Well is the first game that Bigmode has helped put out with Star of Providence next on the list.