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Animal Well (PS5): COMPLETED!

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What if Jet Set Willy was a Metroidvania and it was a still all pixels but all the pixels had thousands of colours and there was amazing light and shadow effects and you got special toys that gave you new skills and it was all creepy and weird and there were ghosts and rooms in total darkness and there were puzzles and switches and you could warp around the map by climbing into the mouths of animals? Animal Well.

Well, maybe it’s not too much like Jet Set Willy but it definitely felt like the natural evolution of it had 3D gaming never existed or something.

The story in Animal Well is seemingly thus: You are a blob which hatches and then for Reasons have to find four mystic flames to light candles on four totems and then defeat some big evil. Bit of an ask for a day-old baby blob but games not have to make sense. The game plays out as mostly a platformer, where you explore a world which, in Metroidvania style, becomes larger as you gain skills that let you open pathways to new or previously unreachable areas.

These skills come in the form of toys, like a yoyo which lets you hit buttons from a distance (or round corners), a slinky that can “wall” down steps or drop through certain platforms, and a flying disc (not a Frisbee for legal reasons) that can hit switches across large gaps, but can also distract dogs that would like to eat you. You can also jump on the disc and use it to travel across chasms.

These skills make for some usual puzzles and gimmicks to navigate round the world, which is beautifully drawn with some amazing pixel art. It looks pretty good in screenshots but it’s when everything is in motion that you really get the benefit of the lighting effects. I also liked the tiny little controller rumbles and feedback you get from jumping around.

Although there are plenty of baddies in the world, including a few bosses, you can’t really damage most of them with your “weapons”. You can with some, and stun others, but most of the time you have to either avoid them, trap them, or cause environmental damage by dropping rocks on them or something. There are also quite a few benign creatures that you can coax into use as platforms, switch triggers, or blockers in various ways too.

As well as the main goal, there’s a lot of hidden stuff to find. Markings on walls, shapes, oddly lit things. Some unlock secrets, others seem just for fun. They reminded me a bit of Fez, although Animal Well isn’t quite as deep and complex as that.

There are also a load of literal Easter Eggs to collect, mostly hidden in secret places, which unlock a few extra, but optional, items. I suspect for some the real end game is to get all of them, and I got about 55 of the 64 but just couldn’t find any more and didn’t want to resort to a guide. I did have an amazing time playing Animal Well though, and love the fact it was a PS++++++++ free rental because I was this close to buying it on the Switch when I noticed it was on PSN!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Did I completely forget that this was also an arcade game? Pretty sure I only ever knew it as a SNES title, but no – here’s the arcade version. It is, as you’d expect, very similar to the original version but with better graphics and animation, and levels set in various time periods like “dinosaurs” and “pirates” as the title would suggest.

It felt somewhat easier than the original, perhaps because there are a few more moves and certainly more floor pizza to pick up. It still required a virtual piggy bank filled with virtual coins to get through (in two-player mode this time) but as before, it’s button mashing mindless fun.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Yes! The arcade version! It’s another game on the Cowabunga Collection, and probably the best one on there from what I remember.

Sure, it’s mindless and lacking in combos and special moves like newer examples of the genre, but it’s a classic and you can never hear “SAY YOIRE PRAYERS, TOITLES” too many times. Also, being an arcade game designed to extract as many coins from your purse as possible, it’s really rather hard and the bosses especially are just unfair money-sponges, but it doesn’t matter when you can just feed it unlimited virtual credits.

We also played through in three player, which is a very unusual thing these days.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Originally a Game Boy game, this TMNT game is now one of the games on the “Cowabunga” collection, and it… isn’t great. Pretty sure it wasn’t great at the time, either, what with the flickery graphics and barely-there animation and repetitive gameplay and the tiny viewport and, well, it goes on. It’s not that far from Kung Fu Master for most of the game, having to attack enemies as they approach from left and right, but there’s also some basic platforming and jumping over tumbling rocks and stuff.

In the Game Boy’s heyday, there were probably a trillion (conservative estimate) games near identical to this with various different licences, but being Turtles, Fall of the Foot Clan was probably more visible. Plus, you get to choose which turtle you want to be for each level even though they make no difference whatsoever, bar the two animation frames of swapped out weapons.

Still, it isn’t terrible. The Game Boy was incredibly underpowered and by rights shouldn’t have even been able to manage half the games it did, but FotFC is not the best fit for the device.

Lost in Play (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A point and click adventure game set in the imaginations of two kids playing with a weird collection of creatures and characters, some Alice In Wonderland-esque trippiness, and some fantastic art and cartoon level animation? Sure, why not.

Not unlike The Many Pieces of Mr Coo, Lost in Play is wordless, with intent and conversations in the game taking place via icons, gestures and various non-vocal grunts and outbursts. It does mean that a bit of nuance is lost, but it also means the devs don’t need to localise. Besides, it’s all nonsensical, what with gnomes and frogs and strange flying devices and a toilet inside a whale, so actually trying to understand is probably unnecessary.

It wasn’t especially hard, mainly as it did manage to have puzzles that made some sort of logical sense (if no real-world sense, of course), and I found it thoroughly enjoyable and humorous. And very pretty and well animated.