In our experience speaking with passionate game creators big and small, one thing is a constant: they’re more than happy to tell you all about where the idea of their game came from. This is also true of Billy Basso (AKA: Shared Memory), the sole developer behind the hard-to-define Animal Well. We reached out to him to discuss the inspirations behind the game that he has spent the last seven years designing and programming.
It was the documentary film Indie Game: The Movie, which recounts the tumultuous development of now-legendary titles Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Fez, that inspired Basso to release his own game someday.
“That was over ten years ago,” he says. It was around this time that Basso changed courses from studying film and video and went into programming. “I distinctly remember I was walking down the street getting lunch, and I took a vow that I would do this at some point in my life.” He would later work for a handful of different game companies, chipping away at what would become Animal Well in his free time, calling it his “after-hours hobby project” where he tested far-out design ideas that wouldn’t ever be greenlit at a studio. “I was working in complete isolation. There was no one there to tell me no,” he says with a laugh.
With the help of Bigmode – a publisher formed by popular YouTuber videogamedunkey and his wife – Basso has fulfilled that self-made promise with the release of Animal Well on 9th May. If you’re unfamiliar with Animal Well, it takes place entirely within a dank well filled to the brim with item-based puzzles, hidden secrets, and animals that are both adorable and frightening. You control a pink little blob that Basso says doesn’t have an official name, but we think looks a little bit like Kirby. It’s visually inspired by retro games with scanlines baked in and crisp pixel graphics that help contrast the sombre hues of a dark well with vivid light sources.
We asked Basso to describe his game, as Steam labels Animal Well with Metroidvania and puzzle tags while the official website claims it’s a ‘survival horror puzzle game about secrets,’ yet neither description felt like it fit after we spent 30 hours exploring its complex, puzzle-filled labyrinth. Sure, seeking out items and abilities that allow you to travel deeper into all four quadrants of the sprawling 2D map certainly sounds like a Metroidvania, but these items are yo-yos and frisbees, not double jumps and air dashes, and there’s almost no combat to speak of. Instead, we found Animal Well far more similar to a game like Tunic despite vastly different mechanics, as both are obviously inspired by the esoteric puzzles of Fez.
Basso couldn’t fit Animal Well into a neat little box, either. “From the get-go, Animal Well wasn’t made with an audience in mind I could pitch to,” Basso explains. “It’s a weird mish-mash of genres that doesn’t fit cleanly into anything.”
Instead, Basso set out to create a game all about secrets. A game infused with a sense of discovery that surprises its players with what it’s capable of. There are survival horror influences and mechanics pulled from old Nintendo games, and Basso says he might’ve sprinkled some Metal Gear Solid stuff in there. It’s clear he wasn’t motivated to innovate upon or pay homage to any one game from his childhood.
When lightly pressed, however, Basso does admit there was a specific title that inspired that sense of discovery integral to Animal Well’s core design: the absurdity of Super Mario Bros. 2.
“There’s something about the older Mario games, specifically Super Mario Bros. 2. They’re aggressively nonsensical,” Basso says with a laugh. “The world completely makes up its own rules. You kind of sound crazy when describing what’s going on in that world.” Basso went on to elaborate that when you’re pulling turnips out of the ground, you learn that they’re a tool to defeat enemies with. “You spend four worlds understanding that you can pick them up and throw them. At one point, you pull one up, and it’s a rocket ship. You’re now in a rocket ship. Little moments like that.”
Another example would be the hawk mouths that Mario and his friends enter at the end of every level. “You do that a few times and you get comfortable with it,” Basso explains. “Towards the end [of Super Mario Bros. 2], the hawk mouth detaches from the wall, and it’s like a boss fight. What’s going on there? Those are some of my favourite moments [in gaming].”
You may notice similar animal-themed mouths to crawl into in Animal Well, though we won’t spoil if any of them attempts to eat you or not.
This nonsensical surprise factor common in older games led to Basso’s gameplay-first design philosophy. Basso would think of a mechanic or program, something that feels good to do, but later on would rationalize how it fits into Animal Well’s world. This can be seen in the lack of traditional Metroidvania-style weapons, which Basso made a self-imposed rule not to use. Instead, the little pink blob you control drops a slinky to hit switches and throws a yo-yo to clear debris. It doesn’t make much sense for the player to find either of those things inside a dank, animal-filled well, yet it doesn’t take long for the nonsensicalness of it not to matter before the game flips how these items are used in surprising ways.
Basso didn’t just restrict himself with item design, either. He also placed limitations on himself not only for the scope of the game – there’s only so much a single developer can do – but also because limitation breeds creativity, as is often seen in retro titles that were limited in many respects by hardware. This is most notable with Animal Well’s visual design, which looks as if you’re playing on an old CRT. Basso set the resolution of the game early, so when he went to add production value to it later on, it pushed him in a unique direction with lightning techniques that are used in many puzzles. Likewise, not having any cutscenes led him down a path that trusts the player to discover the game world and how to navigate it firsthand.
“Everything in Animal Well is built in a different way than a lot of other games, in a large part due to the constraints I put on it,” he concludes.
We definitely felt this was the case as we played. We won’t spoil how, but despite there being no cutscenes and, therefore, no narrative pulling you along, Basso creatively wove in threads of a story for those with the patience to piece together environmental clues.
It might take a small army to fully uncover that story and to solve all of Animal Well’s puzzles, however. Much like Tunic and Fez before it, Animal Well promises to have players stumped by and collaborating on cryptic puzzles for years after release. He hopes these secrets will facilitate a community similar to those we had on the playground as kids before the internet took over with detailed FAQs and in-depth guides. In fact, Animal Well feels distinctly like two games – one quest that just about anyone can solve by themselves and a daunting post-game of mind-melting puzzles that clearly drew inspiration from Fez and requires a community effort.
“I think of [Animal Well] as multiple games that are superimposed on top of each other. The part I’m most excited about is that backend secret hunt. But I figured to get people to care about the secrets, I had to make a compelling game as a base. I needed to first make something that was broadly accessible and fun. All of that is to lay the foundation for this set of puzzles and secrets.”
That backend puzzle hunt sent us running to Discord ourselves, delving deep in a pre-release server of reviewers and journalists also trying to solve them. It did distinctly remind us of the old days during lunch breaks at school where we shared tips on where to find hidden Warp Zones and how to capture Mewtwo.
Community collaboration, Basso reiterates, was part of the plan from the beginning.“There’s already hearsay and rumours. This is one way that games can bring people together. I feel like there’s going to be a point where it gets too hard to figure out on your own. I want people to collaborate and share notes.”
Basso confirms that there are things in the game no one will find for a very, very long time. “Games used to be able to take more risks in terms of how they taught mechanics to a player, and it was okay if a player didn’t see everything. I wanted to hearken back to that a little bit, to make a game that was more okay with hiding things and keeping things a secret.”
In this way, he hopes those who play Animal Well will always have something to wonder about to search for, even with the number of online guides such a game is certain to generate. He even recommends forming a little book club in order to replicate that old-school community experience, much the same way we did with our peers in the pre-release Discord.
Despite clear influences from older games, Animal Well has more than a few new, unique ideas for those of us who grew up in the 1990s. Foremost among them is the contrast between the sheer horror of a ghostly dog chasing you through the labyrinth to riding an adorable chinchilla to solve a puzzle. There’s nothing quite like it. In fact, in preparation for this interview, we browsed through the official Animal Well Discord server, where user Lemon asked Basso if the game was a “horrorish game” with scary characters or something more cozy.
Basso’s answer was “Yes.”
“I feel like there’s a lot of potential for games to mix and match gameplay mechanics from different genres with different art styles that people don’t typically expect,” he answers when asked how this unique atmosphere came about. “Animal Well is not a cozy game and it’s not a horror game. Because it’s so common that games stick to these established archetypes, a lot of people that are drawn to the art of one game miss out on a lot of interesting game mechanics and styles of play.”
That’s how Animal Well’s creepily cute atmosphere came to be: Basso pulled from plenty of games for inspiration, but he wanted to pair it with visuals that people weren’t expecting. He hopes that those uninterested in the Metroidvania foundation he built Animal Well upon will be drawn in by how it looks, while Metroidvania fans might pick up the game and enjoy the esoteric puzzles more than they expected.
Animal Well’s unique presentation caught the eye of perhaps the most famous videogame essayist on YouTube, videogamedunkey (Jason Gastrow) and his new publishing company Bigmode. Basso explained that he and his marketing director, Dan Adelman, had planned to self-publish before Gastrow made a short shoutout to Animal Well in one of his videos. It was a few months later, at the Tokyo Game Show, that they met Jason and his wife Leah in person. From that meeting, Animal Well was set to become the first game released under the Bigmode label.
To conclude, we asked Basso how he feels about his journey from being inspired by an indie documentary to being picked up and published by a famous YouTuber. “I’m very excited. The people who have played early are enjoying it a lot, and I’m excited for it to be opened up to the rest of the world. But I’m also in kind of a spinlock of worrying,” Basso says, laughing. “About everything that could go wrong.”
From our time with the game, we’re not sure there’s much that can go wrong. It’s clear Basso succeeded in his ambition to bring a sense of discovery into every inch of this creepily cute puzzle-heavy Metroidvania. It fits right in with the likes of Braid, Fez, and Tunic, despite vastly different gameplay concepts, and we cannot wait to see what Basso puts out next – or if anyone ever uncovers some of the deepest, most esoteric secrets in Animal Well.
Animal Well launches today on PS5 and Nintendo Switch.