Revealed earlier this week on PlayStation Blog along with many other upcoming PS4/PS5 indie games, Animal Well is a title that even its creator Billy Basso - former Associate Software Engineer at Netherrealm Studios - and Dan Adelman - indie game business and marketing man extraordinaire - have a hard time describing. We recently invited to pair onto The Duel Screens Podcast to share more about details about this enigmatic PS5 console exclusive.
Nirav from GL: "Animal Well has shattered my understanding of game design in the best ways."
I'm Loving it! The physical edition goes on sale tomorrow from LRG. I know a lot of people dislike them, but I want a physical copy of this game so I'm gonna double dip and buy it again!
A small but mighty metroidvania that you won't be able to put down
WTMG's Leo Faria: "I would like to reiterate that the fact Animal Well was created by a sole developer is worthy of an entire room giving it a standing ovation. It’s impeccably well-designed, with a ton of secrets to unfold, but I also feel it wasn’t that much fun at all times. I’m all for a game not holding my hand throughout its entire runtime, but it didn’t need to feel so cryptic, and so focused on trial-and-error, especially when its checkpoints were way too far away from each other. At times, I loved exploring its many secrets. Other times, I felt so frustrated I wanted to throw my Switch across the room. All in all, it’s still worth checking out if you’re into a deceptively complex metroidvania, but be aware of some truly obnoxious design choices and roadblocks."
That's kind of the curse of AAA games, even though a lot of them are great, barely any of them are revolutionary in terms of game design. That's where indies come in to push the industry forward. It not that bad of a symbiotic relationship actually. No big company wants to gamble 50m+ if it will turn out good or not, and a lot of these indies gets crowdfunded/investor money so the risk isnt as big either.
“The biggest challenge we’re gonna face in the marketing side of things is screenshots won’t do this justice – even short video snippets don’t do it justice!, says Adelman – who’s worked on indie games such as Axiom Verge, Chasm, Mages of Mystralia, and is now working alongside side Basso.
Now I’m curious.
Most indie games are just copies of other indie games in some way or another so it’s no different than AAA . There are occasional unique games but not many
Games were cheaper to make back in the good old days, so companies took more risks and even survived really bad reviews/launches. Nowadays, games consist of 100-1000 man development teams, all with the quest to bring high graphical fidelity.... thus, far too expensive. So less riskier trends are now followed (BF2042 is a prime example)