Animal Well, last year’s intricate 2D exploration game from developer Billy Basso, was one of our favorite games of 2024. The puzzles within the lo-fi Metroidvania-ish sidescroller run so deep, and rattled our brains with such force, that we barely wanted to describe the secrets within while wholeheartedly recommending it. But according to a new documentary from Second Wind, Animal Well would have been so much harder if not for Dunkey, YouTuber turned video game publisher, who begged Basso for mercy.
“He’s a genius level guy,” Dunkey says of Basso in a new interview. “He’s so devious. That was our big contribution to Animal Well: trying to talk Billy away from making it evil. ‘It really should be a little less evil.’ And eventually he said, ‘OK, I will make it a little less evil.’”
Second Wind’s The Making of Animal Well charts the entire process of bringing the indie game to life, from Basso’s days spent skinning mobile games at NetherRealm to the inspirations for his cryptic animal fantasy world to the uphill battle of getting like Animal Well seen and played by millions. Eventually, Dunkey enters the picture, bringing Animal Well under the banner of his distribution enterprise BigMode, and the rest is history. And that’s when Dunkey discovered that Basso was devious.
“I tried to design some puzzles as hard as I could possibly imagine,” Basso says in the doc. That extended beyond the actual game, leading Basso to string potential players along in meta-mysteries scattered throughout the game’s promotion materials and announcements, too. But as he realizes in the moments when Animal Well finally hit Steam, the internet is too obsessed with cracking codes to let even the most buried secrets lay dormant for too long.
“To truly hide something in a game is arguably impossible,” Basso says. “You no longer have this schoolyard word-of-mouth slow dissemination of information. The Discord was insane to watch.”
Dunkey was particularly shocked at the pace in which people burrowed into Animal Well.
“Secrets Billy thought would take 10 years, they figured out in the first week,” the publisher says, with genuine shock.
Maybe Animal Well could have been more evil?
Watch the full 40-minute The Making of Animal Well above, and find more deep dives from Second Wind on its YouTube channel.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/gaming/535877/dunkey-animal-well-evil-second-wind-documentary
