Happy Monday, folks! Welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread, the Avocado’s biweekly hotspot for video game discourse. And I surely need these two weeks, because I’ve been playing a ton! I hit the end credits of four games last week! The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was the first, and then it was my often annual replay of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, and then Shadow Complex, and finally Animal Well. Four games, three played for the first time, two new releases from 2024, and one for my nearly done monthly series. I’m just two months to go, baby!
Oh wait, here’s an update since I wrote the rest of this last night: I just beat Portrait of Ruin a few minutes ago!
But let’s forgo all but one of these, because Animal Well was an especially unique delight. It’s a Metroidvania where your abilities are as big of puzzles as the problems they’re meant to solve. It’s a world of few words—like, you’re told what you’ve found, but nothing more, and I don’t think you can actually find that brief name anywhere else in a menu or in a map or anything. It has a structure that is, for the most part, familiar; it simply obfuscates it in a delightful way. And that doesn’t even get into its pixel graphics. I don’t even know how to describe its art style… “8-bit psychadelic?” “Expressionist nightmare fuel?” This screenshot was meant to just be basic and easy to see, but anyone who’s looked into this game knows what I mean.
More than anything else, what makes Animal Well distinct its is absolute, rigorous dedication to being obtuse and inscrutable. To create a world that can only be understood through examination as a viewer and experimentation as a player. The closest easy comparison I can figure is Fez, albeit with a more pleasing aesthetic and somewhat more interesting gameplay (both of them have effectively no game feel at all, but this one works it a lot better). However, while it is about the most extreme I’ve ever seen, it’s far from the only game in a wave of inscrutable and actively challenging games. This year also brought us Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, but—perhaps in the wake of games like Fez, Limbo, and Dark Souls, alongside a public reappraisal of old NES-era classics—games like this have been cropping up a lot over the past few years. Tunic, for instance, which I really gotta redo. Rain World, which I probably won’t try, given how actively antagonistic it is. Baba Is You, Viewfinder and Gorogoa, sort of, Manifold Garden, and The Room on iPad and Switch all carry at least some of these mechanics, aesthetics, and strangeness. You don’t really see this that much from larger companies (Nintendo and FromSoftware do this in smaller bits, but rarely with whole games), and that makes sense. These are, by design, hard to parse and rarely meant with broad, mainstream audiences in mind. So I’m happy that we can be in a space where games like these are more of an accepted taste. Especially now that I’ve become invested in them. I mean, I even managed to beat Animal Well without using a guide!*
* technically, I used a guide to look up the name of the final boss after beating it.
My prompt, from this, is such: have you experienced games like this, are there elements of these that particularly speak to you, which (if any) would you like to play, and if you are a fan, what kinds of things do you look for in this strange, mostly indie-centric meta-genre? I’m personally excited to dive into them more, so I can’t deny that this is, as it so often is with me, a request for new options to play. But I remain fascinated by the nature of how we play games and what we can get from them, so games that are deliberate obtuse and challenging on this level are especially exciting. They essentially give us something we’ll only ever practically experience in this medium.
Anyway, in the meantime, what did you play this weekend? Obviously, I’ve, uh, played a lot.