So what if dominoes was an art deco dungeon crawling roguelike deck-building puzzle game?

You’ve inherited a fortune from your great uncle, but only if you’re able to reach room 46 of his 45 room house. Getting to the room involves solving logic and cryptic puzzles, realising that random items in each room might actually be important clues, and putting together hidden messages and objects to understand your family’s past and the reason the house is so weird.

The weirdness of the house comes about from the fact that each day, it is emptied of all the rooms. Each door you open requires you to draft the room that will appear on the other side of it, and you can choose from three randomly chosen rooms from a larger deck each time.

Rooms have different purposes, with different door layouts, so it’s possible to dead-end yourself and that’s where the roguelike bit of the game comes in – you call it a day and start afresh tomorrow. The house layout resets, you lose all the items you’ve collected, and you give it another go. You can also end a day if you run out of steps – you only start with so many and each room you enter (or re-enter, so backtracking is penalised) uses one up. Food you find and sometimes drafting bedrooms can boost your number of steps, though.

As you play, you find a few things which do persist between days, like being able to start with some money – which you can use to buy things in some rooms – or gems – which you mainly use to draft rarer or more powerful rooms. You can also open up permanent shortcuts and boons, and start with more steps.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that you’re at the mercy of the random number generator in order to progress, but that’s no different to Rogue, really. Most runs have you finding something new, like a bit of story, a secret, a clue, a new room in your room pool or a permanent bonus of some kind so even failed runs usually have some progression. For example, you may find a safe combination but then fail to get the room with the safe in it on the same run, but your knowledge of the combination carries over.

It’s smart, weird, occasionally cruel, but always intriguing. And who wouldn’t want to explore a reassembling, randomly generated family mansion full of secrets and puzzles, one failed day at a time?

One good thing about PS++++++++++, is that in amongst all the crap games and shovelware there are a load of co-op games that are fun for me to play with my daughter. It’s because of an afternoon where we were looking for something to play together that we were trawling through the library and spotted Phogs (or possibly “PHOGS!”), and now we’ve completed it.

In many ways, this game falls into a similar category as other wonky-physics titles like Human Fall Flat and Totally Reliable Delivery Service, in that you have inaccurate control over a character and have to manipulate objects in the environment in order to progress. An additional hinderance here, however, is that each player controls either end of a double-ended dog. Imagine a sausage dog with a head at each end, Push-Me-Pull-You style, with each independently moved by each player. You can make things cosy by sharing a single controller and having a stick each, but we were fine to go with a pad apiece.

Anyway. That’s all logistics waffle – what about the game?

It’s a sort of platformy-puzzley game, where your phog has to reach a big snake at the end of each level who swallows you and moves you on to the next. In the way are gaps you have to fill, plants you have to water, items you have to collect, water spouts you have to plug, and dark areas you have to light up (or vice versa). Mostly, these are achieved by grabbing something with one or both of your phog heads. For example, there’s a watermelon patch that needs watering so the watermelon can grow and create a platform for you to progress. Nearby is a pipe with water coming out. You grab on to the pipe with one phogmouth and then the other phogmouth becomes a hose, and – since you can also stretch your phog – you can use this to reach the patch and water the watermelon.

Cooperation is absolutely key, as you can imagine, especially on the many “swing over this gap” sections, where you can grab hold of a hook (or something) with one phoghead then swing the other phoghead to the next hook and grab hold, repeating until you’ve swung all the way over. Timing is often critical so we found ourselves counting to three a lot. Thankfully, you can’t really die and if you fall off the world (which is inevitable give the wonky physics and lack of coordination) you don’t lose much progress at all.

It’s not a very long game, with us finishing it in about three hours, but we enjoyed it and the silly hats you can unlock (which do nothing except adorn a head). There’s a fair amount of variety across the four main worlds, with bosses of a sort on each. The “night and day” world has some especially clever light-and-dark, awake-and-asleep and perspective puzzles and events. The final world also has a short section where there’s a big change to the game mechanics, although I won’t spoil it. Oh, and eating all the food you find so you get phat phogs never gets old or boring.

It’s nice and colourful and mostly low stress (unlike, say, Overcooked), and we didn’t end up fighting each other or anything so that’s probably a recommendation?

Looking for a co-op game to play with my daughter (and mourning the lack of yearly, or even twice-yearly Lego games), I stumbled across this on PS++++++++ (or however many plusses I have). We’d enjoyed the first game a while back so why not?

It’s more of the same, really. You have to pick up and carry (or throw) furniture from houses to your truck, sometimes you have to do the reverse, and other times you’ve weird requirements like chucking certain things in portals or catching farm animals. All against the clock, and frequently with doors that are one-way, platforms that move, drones, and things that need to be broken (or not broken) in order to progress. With a multidimensional rift you have to sew back up with the help of some IT gnomes or something. Obviously.

There are plenty of silly moments that made us laugh, and it’s all very stupid in all the right ways. Much like the first game. Oh, and toilets. Of course there are toilets. There’s a whole level where you have to collect them. A++ would play again.

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!