Mind-bending puzzle metroidvania Animal Well just released yesterday, and already a community of players is tearing the game apart to find its many, many, many, many secrets. Right now, that includes a ridiculously complicated puzzle that requires at least 50 different people to participate. And just one day after launch, the community is on the cusp of completing it.
Warning: Massive spoilers for Animal Well's "third layer" of secrets follow! If you want to get into its multi-tiered puzzle layers yourself, please shift into reverse and come back later! Read our spoiler-free review instead!
Animal Well effectively contains a three-tiered secret hunt of sorts. The first tier just involves collecting four flames and seeing 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 reviewing the game, the small Discord community of reviewers I was in managed to find a total of 12 rabbits collectively in two weeks, and we suspect there are at least 20. In the first 24 hours since the game has been out, the community has handlily pushed that total to 14, and seems to be on the cusp of working together as a group to achieve bunny 15 by participating in a bonkers group puzzle.
Early on in the game, players will pass a massive, 40x10 mural of a pixelated rabbit mid-hop. At first, it seems like this mural is just decoration, but once you enter the late-game rabbit hunt, it becomes increasingly suspicious. Poking around further in the same room reveals a control panel that lets players manipulate the mural's tiles, and digging even deeper will give players access to a 4x4 grid of tiles similar to the ones on the rabbit mural. But taken alone, it's not clear what the solution to this is or how the 4x4 grid factors into the big rabbit.
It turns out, every player has a different 4x4 grid of tiles, that when put together, seem to form a complete image. That means in order to finish the new image that needs to replace the existing rabbit, the community needs to work together to assemble a total of 50 unique tiles - and that's assuming no one shows up with a duplicate. Our review Discord managed to put together almost 20 (including tile contributions from developers Billy Basso and Dan Adelman) before the game was out, but it wasn't near enough on its own to establish anything close to a meaningful picture. However, in just the first 24 hours since release, the community has figured out the mural's secret and contributed even more tiles. As I type this, a few intrepid secret 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) might be on the verge of cracking it.
Wacky as this might sound, this is somehow not even the most absurd secret Animal Well has to offer. In the same period as the mural was being solved, players have found even more obscure hidden secrets that may lead to more rabbits or even more esoteric collectibles - and we still don't know what all the bunnies will do when assembled. The dive into the depths of Animal Well has only begun.
If it's not evident from my obsession with this secret hunt that I loved 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 simply play around with, and an utter delight to slowly crack open, secret by secret."
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
