Mind-blowing puzzle metroidvania Animal Well was released yesterday and already a community of players is tearing the game apart to discover its many, many, many, a lot secrets. Currently, this involves a ridiculously complex puzzle that requires at least 50 different people to participate. And just one day after launch, the community has already decided it.
Warning: Massive spoilers ahead for Animal Well’s “third layer” of secrets! If you want to enter its multi-level puzzle layers yourself, please reverse and come back later! Read ours instead, a spoiler-free review!
Animal Well effectively contains a type of secret hunt on three levels. The first level involves simply collecting four flames and watching the credits roll, while the second is a very literal Easter egg hunt. The third, which many players may never discover, is about collecting rabbits hidden in increasingly esoteric ways. While I was reviewing the game, the small Discord review community I was in managed to find a total of 12 rabbits in two weeks, and we suspect there are at least 20. In the first 24 hours since the game came out, the community has deftly increased that total to 14 and seems to be on track to work together as a group to achieve bunny 15 by participating in a crazy group puzzle.
At the beginning of the game, players will pass a huge 40×10 mural of a pixelated rabbit mid-jump. At first it appears that this mural is just decoration, but once you get into the late rabbit hunt, it becomes increasingly suspicious. Digging further into the same room reveals a control panel that allows players to manipulate the mural’s tiles, and digging even deeper will give players access to a 4×4 grid of tiles similar to those on the rabbit mural. But on its own, it’s not clear what the solution to this is, or how the 4×4 grid affects the big rabbit.
It turns out that each player has a different grid of 4×4 tiles that, when put together, appear to form a complete image. This means that in order to complete the new image to replace the existing rabbit, the community must work together to assemble a total of 50 unique tiles – and that’s assuming no one shows up with a duplicate. Our Discord review managed to collect almost 20 (including tile contributions from developers Billy Basso and Dan Adelman) before the game came out, but it wasn’t close enough on its own to create anything close to a meaningful picture. However, in just the first 24 hours after the release, the community solved the mystery of the mural and contributed even more tiles. As I write this, several intrepid mystery hunters are playing around in PhotoShop, Canva, and in-game to assemble the tiles into something readable, and it looks like one in particular (Discord user CruM) may be on the verge of cracking it.
Update at 12:02 a.m. PT: They solved it! Our friends at TechRaptor have cataloged the group’s progress and have the full solution if you’re after it.
As weird as it sounds, it’s somehow not even the most absurd secret Animal Well has to offer. During the same period that the mural was being unraveled, players discovered even more obscure hidden secrets that could lead to more bunnies or even more esoteric collectibles – and we still don’t know what all the bunnies will do when they’re collected. The dive into the depths of Animal Well has only just begun.
If my obsession with this stealth hunt doesn’t show that I enjoyed Animal Well, I also reviewed it for IGN and gave it a 9/10. I called it “a beautiful, multi-layered puzzle box that’s both fun to just play with and a real treat to slowly open, secret by secret.”
Rebecca Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
