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Animal Well review - this one gets deep

Our review of Animal Well, a mysterious and transporting Metroidvania.

At one point in the middle of the game I stood on a subterranean shoreline and realised that an architectural feature I was faced with, half-buried in the water, often came with a separate mechanism that I could manipulate. This is pixel art, which suggests nostalgia and throwback aesthetics, but there's something very new about the way it is employed to create streams and lakes, or to set a torch swinging on a chain, or spring creepers from the ceiling that brush aside gently as you move by. There is something of watching a theatrical play at work in this game, the awareness of something very live and human intermingled with artificiality, performance threaded along with blacklight tricks, the shifting flats that roll back and forth.

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