Squeezing through the advent calendar window into a sodden glade of flower and coral, you spy a curious organism on a ledge in the shadows. It’s a video game of some description, though it looks like a squirrel, with frantic white eyes. What’s it doing? Ah, whoops, you’ve startled it. Better follow it offscreen.
]]>In a year already stacking up plates of delicious indie game dishes so fast they’re toppling over and crashing onto the floor, spilling splattered food over the carpet to be hoovered up by waiting dogs/cats/raccoons/mice, Animal Well is one of the most generous helpings yet. The captivating, combat-free Metroidvania is rich with a delectable buffet of challenges, puzzles and secrets to find even once you’ve seen the credits roll. Still, players have chewed their way through its more-ish platforming and puzzle-solving much faster than its solo developer intended, it turns out. Luckily for us all, creator Billy Basso is already looking ahead to a new game set in the moody zoo-niverse - even if that’s not a complete sequel.
]]>Computers have always been animal wells, in a sense. They're havens for creatures of many shapes and degrees of literalness, all the way down to the metal. As in ecologies at large, the most abundant and widespread are probably the bugs, beginning with the moth that flew into that Harvard Mark II in 1947 and ending with the teeming contents of the average free-to-play changelog. A little further up the food chain we find "worms", like the Creeper that once invaded the ARPANET, and "gophers", a directory/client system written in 1991 for the University of Minnesota. There are computer animals spawned by branding - foxes of fire and twittering birds and the anonymous beasts that haunt the margins of Google documents. There are computer animals that are implied by the verbs we use in computing - take "browser", derived from the old French word for nibbling at buds and sprouts, which suggests that all modern internet searches are innately herbivorous.
]]>Solo developer Billy Basso's enigmatic Metroidvania Animal Well has been dated for May 9th, publishers Bigmode announced yesterday. In it, you'll explore a vast labyrinth of tunnels, solve puzzles and escape its many mammalian-based horrors, all of whom are out to gobble you up in one fell swoop - though as a strange, tiny little blob creature the size of a chicken nugget, it's unclear both what you are, and why exactly you're so appetising to them. Well, it probably has something to do with looking like a sentient chicken nugget, I suppose. Come and watch the release date trailer below.
]]>Happy New Year, folks! Have you recovered from the all the 100+ hour RPGs that came out last year? Well, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that everyone seems to be taking a bit of a breather in 2024, because (at time of writing at least) the official "big'uns" calendar is looking remarkably slim at the moment. There are still some heavy-hitters coming our way this year, such as Avowed, Star Wars Outlaws and Path Of Exile 2, but 2024 looks like another year where it will be the smaller, independent games that shine the brightest. They certainly make up the bulk of our most anticipated games list for 2024, which the RPS Treehouse has been feverishly putting together over the last few days. The bad news is that there are still loads of great games coming out. So come, join us, and see what's on our personal wishlists for 2024.
]]>It's episode seven of Indiescovery and this week, wow, the gang is tired. With a busy four days in Boston for PAX East, mine and Liam's brains were basically mush last week, so Rebecca - an absolute angel - graciously said she could host a special PAX East episode where she chats with Liam and me about the indies we saw on the show floor and try desperately to string together a coherent sentence. She also made bulletpoints of our entire chat so writing up the shownotes would be easier; we do not deserve her.
]]>Earlier in the week, Liam and I had the opportunity to chat with Animal Well's solo developer and publisher Bigmode about creating their eerie subterranean world. We then had a chance to go hands on with the PAX East demo, and wow, we were both incredibly impressed. Watch the video below for our enthusiastic impressions:
]]>Out of all the game demos Liam and I have played at PAX East, we both agree that Animal Well is something special. It's a 2D metriodvania where you play as a little blob trying to navigate a subtterranean labyrinth filled with creatures - some cute, some not so cute.
]]>Platforming adventure Animal Well has been picked up by Bigmode, the indie publishing company set up last year by YouTuber Videogamedunkey. The Metroidvania is being developed by Shared Memories, another name for solo dev Billy Basso. Basso is crafting a multi-layered puzzle horror platformer that he hopes will keep people playing the game for years, and collaborating to solve its mysteries. You can see a bit more of what to expect from Animal Well in the preview video below.
]]>I was in LA for Summer Geoff Fest and I played a whole bunch of games. No, not lots of blockbusters – mainly because there weren't too many of those about - but lots of indies, instead. In fact, out of all the games I saw or played or glanced at while I dashed between appointments, it was the indies that really stood out.
]]>Day Of The Devs is probably my favourite part of the summer games jamboree every year because it does wonders for the visibility of indie games and their developers. Slotting in snugly right after Geoff regaled us with the Summer Game Fest stream, this year’s Day Of The Devs showcase marked the tenth anniversary. Tim Schafer and friends revealed more about some stonking looking indies from places as far apart as the Netherlands, Japan and Argentina. It was lovely to see some solo devs featured too, such as Madison Karrh with Birth, a point-and-click puzzler about loneliness, and Billy Basso’s beautiful pixel-art Metroidvania Animal Well.
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