Soho News
General Musings
Animal Well and the displeasure of art
So the other day I played animal well, around 20 hours of it.
It is a really well crafted game, its controls are good and tight enabling for some snappy platforming and fast movement, which come in handy with how large the map is.
The visuals are gorgeous, the spriteart is simple but is elevated by the layering of shaders that make the game look like its played on a CRT. It works well with the spriteart to create a sort of modern retro I have not seen in quite a bit.
The puzzles in it, at least on the base layer are quite neat, you have to think about some and others are pretty obvious
Now Spoilers: I did not play much past the credits and did none of the ARG puzzles and stuff, as I think that moment has passed and frankly you cant really engage with the game online without just getting handed the results to some puzzles instantly.
That compounding with my frustrations with some of the game stopped me from engaging with it further after the upgraded bubble wand.
Now onto real hater hours: The game is about 30% - 40% too large.
By the time I came to the last flame (the dog which holy fuck that ones pretty bad) I was genuienly over the whole thing, the many eggs were fun (I did not get them all, I was maybe missing 10 or so) there could have been 20% less of them and it would have been the same.
The puzzles that opened up more puzzles were really fun and novel around the first half of the game, but as it progresed and the game opend up wider and wider and when a end came in sight the more complex ones frankly felt like they needed a degree in cryptology to complete. Combine that with the general lack of (to me) satisfying rewards and I felt like I was genuinely working towards nothing.
The backtracking was also really agressive, and even though you get a fast travel hub and a warp to it, I found myslef spending more time getting places than actually getting things done, I love sinking my teeth into a fair jumping puzzle for example but traversing most of the map felt pretty trivial.
Id say that it would lend itself to the exploration, but by the time you are getting the tools for the more advanced puzzles and movemen you are just going through the motions to pick up clues to backtrack to another location to pick up more clues.
Now part of that I blame on the fact that through the whole playthrough I never felt rewarded finding any of the eggs or solving any of the puzzles and thats genuinely on me I think, adhd and the attentionspan of a fly really didnt set me up for that. I should have stopped playing about 10 hours in but I promised I'd give it a fair try and I think I did.
However, I think unless you dont really love these sort of escalating puzzles, its not for you. In the end I think the strength of the game were misplaced, for how well it controlled it should have leaned a bit more into the bosses, each of them felt like a afterhtought, being either too easy or poorly designed.
That culminated for me at the Dog, which stated previously, was pretty bad. I got its flame last and it was by far the most tedious of them all, Usually I am up for a challenge, I did a few playthroughs of AC6, beat that before they nerfed the bosses and did the Shadow Crytal form the Knight in Deltarune.
Even though I chose to skip forward with the whistle, it still felt insanely unfair. It rubberbanded super hard, did super small circles and in key rooms you kinda have to go through, summoned more dogs that were just cluttering the screen.
Combine that with the fact that it knocks you back when you get hit and you have a problem of trying to dodge three horizontaly fast moving danger areas while one of them homes into you like a stinger missile.
The final boss of the game was a cakewalk compared to tha dawg
I think I will watch someone play the rest of the game to get a idea for the last few puzzles and maybe a speedrun to see what that looks like, but for me this was a pretty miserable experience
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So I had some more time to think about the game and I stand largely by my review, I think a large aspect of why the game felt too large to me was becasue the metroid vania elemts were so poorly exectuted upon.
While the game encurages you to mark some things on the map, gives you pen and stamps, I never really needed it. I maybe placed 10 stamps and marked down the whistle warp.
(furthermore what was up with that? The whistle and warping felt like another aspect very underutilized in the main game)
Disregarding the lackluster rewards you get for completing puzzles (we will get back to this point in a bit), there werent really a lot. The only time I really had to go back to a area to comb through it
more thoughroughly was the lynx one, which in all fairness also wasnt the best with its hidden codes and stuff, it was nice they kept them in the general area though.
I would ave liked it if areas sealed of larger parts of it, so that it really felt like you were doing a victory lap after you got every powerup.
Now onto the puzzles, a lot of them felt like they were meant to stumble upon, and thats fine, but when your whole game is about that you cant really expect me to do all of them.
Or even find all of them. A lot of what I came acrosss was incidental, and ere I have to praise the backtracking a bit, a lot of the puzzles that felt findable on your own, you were
destined to come across. But then the problems start, from what I understand there are puzzles in this game that require the community to solve (the barcode one, I am not that clever and from what I know,
you dont get a hint as to what it is). And playing it this long after it launched and hype came and went, it really is impossible without just getting the solution for the puzzle.
And maybe thats intended but it feels like a cheapout to me because thinking about it now, I kinda would have tried sinking my teeth more into it past what I did if there wasnt such a spike
in difficulty. (dificulty being somethimes that you just would not be able to solve something without looking it up if your intelligence is too low)
And maybe thats why the guy made this game, maybe it a performance of his, a experiment, see how far people come before they break, make people about how far they wanna go, they can go.
And whatever, if thats the case, good on him but man.
So overall I think its around a 6/10, the game is [ART] and not [FUN]. I would reccomend it if you like to sink your teeth into puzzles or like colect-a-thons, love escape rooms and the sort.
I would not reccomend it if you like metroidvanias and only barely if you like platformers, for that there is enough there but you should not bother with the optional stuff.
Making sense of what you like
Been thinking about how to review media. It is obviously a largely subjective thing, I think trying to measure the quality of a piece of media is pretty futile, surely you can try to quantify things like graphics or competence of a written story or controls of a character or game mechanics.
But in the end engaging with a piece of art is incredibly individual process.
From time to time I listen to the Pondering Spooky Tapes podcast, and they use as scale thats [ART<>COOL], I think I want to elaborate on that a bit changing things up a bit. And here I want to say that again that these terms are highly subjective, whats artful to one might be cool to another but I want to try to explain what those terms mean to me. Something thats artful elaborates on on mechanics in ways that are visually or philosophically interesting for example, something thats cool executes on its premise in a way that makes you root for the artist.
Now I want to propose a third axis thats FUN, fun to me gives you enjoyment of something separate from its artfulness or coolness, you might not necessarily enjoy somethings, but can appreciate that its cool, or artful in a way. And you might enjoy something thats not really cool or artful.
So we end up with this triangle where you can place media. I'll demonstrate with some games.
Animal well to me was cool and artful but not very fun. Deltarune is fun and artful but rather uncool. Disco Elysium is Artful and Cool and Fun and would end up in the middle.
We can also do it with something like movies.
ZARDOZ is artfull and fun. STAR WARS is fun and cool. Cannon movies would lean more towards cool and fun with a heavy tendence towards cool.
Anyway. I like thinking about this stuff. Ill attache a diagram, if I havent, scream at me.
BIKE NEWS
My bike fucking exploded, the chain broke and shaved off teeth from the pinion after making itself independent.
As of writing this, I am still stranded, but new parts are ordered. i got the bike from my uncle who seemed to have tinkered on it himself as I have been told by the bike shop guy that a hub transmission usually isnt paired with two front pinions.
DEEP SPACE 9
ok just because I am watching it as I am typing this, Keiko was trying to convince Rom to let Nog attend her classes and the camera just did a insane thing where it followed her leaving the bar and stopped at a scene of those Bajoran Terrorists discussing things, seamlessly. T his show is really impressive in all regards, it is very artful and cool and fun.
Commissions
Some Jugendstil Goblins
Some Items
Various Arts
