If there’s one thing people who make and play video games love more than video games, it’s labels. People Love to label a game, invent a genre, categorize and sort it and indicate some kind of rudimentary ownership. YouTubers have built entire careers around this.
Animal welfare encourages this thinking. It’s like a Metroidvania – you know, the kind of game where there’s a vast 2D map and you run back and forth, looking for locked doors and impenetrable thresholds that become trivial once you find the right tchotchke to get past them . However, I would discourage you from thinking about it this way, or telling others that this is what it does. It’s all a ruse.
I should probably clear the air here. I have some history with the word “Metroidvania.” The short version? I do not like it. This is purely a semantic aversion, a hard-nosed opinion about jargon and what it is useful for. Really games in that genre? Love them.
Anyway, the first clue that something might be wrong with it Animal welfare is in the way that – if it is in fact a Metroidvania – it refuses to work like any Metroidvania you’ve seen before. High platforms are not reached by a double jump. Each item has multiple functions. Nothing is particularly clear.
What Animal welfare really is a collection of puzzles. Puzzles upon puzzles. Puzzles that are very obvious and puzzles that you can walk past dozens of times without realizing they are there. The items are puzzles, and using them allows you to try out even more elaborate puzzles. It challenges you to understand the world in front of you, and then that understanding becomes more complicated.
I’ve had a few conversations with friends who don’t like Metroidvanias and love Animal welfare, and I would say this is the reason. Each screen offers something new to explore, maybe even more than one. And while “puzzle game” isn’t the sexiest or particularly suggestive genre descriptor, it is is describes something that people instinctively like to do. We love solving puzzles. By solving them we learn to do most things in life; it’s a skill so fundamental that we forget how entangled it is in our perception of the world.
I think most people who spend any time with Animal welfare realizes this on some level. Even if we disagree on the words we use to describe Animal welfarethat is immediately clear find out what it is is the main pleasure you get from playing it, and whatever labels we put on it are secondary.
Then let me give you one last suggestion: ignore what I just said and don’t call it a puzzle game. Call it a mystery.