I'm making some good progress with this EGS backlog. Hopefully I can keep the momentum going. BACKGROUND:
I remember seeing snippets of this game at one of Nintendo's Indie World Showcases and I thought the gameplay looked intriguing. It was never a big priority on my wish list, however, so I never got around to buying it. Just my luck; EGS made it free for a week. PLOT: You play as a BOT-C engineer, a robot originally designed to maintain an ancient facility hidden deep within a mountain. The bot wakes up many decades after said facility has fallen into ruin, and now it must go through the facility to restore it. Unfortunately, the facility is guarded by the eponymous creature, who is hellbent on making sure that the facility never comes to life. It is made clear early on that the facility is meant to stop the unending sandstorms that plague the surrounding area, and thus provide respite for the denizens of Mirage, a nearby desert village. The creature, for whatever sinister reason, will stop at nothing to make sure that doesn't happen. As you explore the facility's many sections, you'll encounter various data logs and notes left behind by the person who led the development of the facility. You'll learn more about what each section is meant to do (and a few details on how it's meant to go about performing its functions), the origins of the engineers (plus details on the technology they use, and the fate that befalls them), more insight on the storms that are wreaking havoc on the area (and the sense of urgency people have when it comes to controlling them), and the eventual discovery of the creature (who is adversarial from the start). I thought the game's world was interesting overall. I liked learning about the initially mysterious facility and its inner workings, and while the player character itself is just a robot that only seems to be driven by its programmed purpose, I was still invested in the journey to restore the facility despite the opposition of the creature. PRESENTATION: The game is visually striking, boasting a cel-shaded style with bright, mostly flat colors that really pop out. It looks like a highly stylized comic book, and I love it. And despite most of the game taking place within the facility, there is still variety in the environments, with some areas overgrown with plant life, and others looking like the interior of the Death Star. That's not even mentioning the desert outside the facility, which feels extra desolate thanks to all the sandstorm effects. I also must note how the game loves to play with the camera and shift the view as you move along rooms in dungeons. I thought this was neat, but it's a little disorienting when you need to refer to the in-game map. The music goes for a chill, moody tone that adds to the feeling of isolation as you navigate the abandoned facilities. Can't say I find too many tracks memorable, but I think the soundtrack did its job just fine. GAMEPLAY: On the surface, Creature in the Well looks like one of those hack-and-slash dungeon crawlers where you go through dungeons and beat up hordes of enemies. It certainly controls as if it's a game like that, but its main gimmick is where it gets wild: it's actually a cross between a dungeon crawler... and pinball? You do swing a melee weapon around, but instead of doing so to inflict damage, you do so to whack orbs around. These orbs will bounce around, and you'll want to direct these to bumpers in the many rooms you'll run into within the facility. Hitting the bumpers will charge them up, and fully charging all the bumpers will often unlock doors and activate puzzle elements. Additionally, hitting bumpers will charge you up, and that power acts as a sort of currency you'll need to spend to open doors. Aiming your shots is a quite tricky, and the default arrow that shows where your shot will go doesn't take into account angles. There is a way to get around this, as in addition to your regular swing (which just sends the orb flying), there's a separate charge swing where you swing at the orb and it starts to glow white. Not only does this empower the orb (making it so any bumpers it hits in this state charge up faster and give out more power), but this also holds the orb in place for a second, allowing you to carefully reposition it or yourself so you can make the best possible shot. It took me a while to get the hang of the main mechanic, though. Almost every door in the dungeons is locked until you spend a specific amount of power to unlock them, so there is actually good reason to go apeshit on the bumpers and hit them with orbs. Truthfully, this manner of design makes progression a grind, but I was enjoying the act of playing this game's take on pinball (and finding great satisfaction at racking up the equivalent of points) that it never really felt like grinding to me. Though many of the bumpers you run into are simply for the purpose of racking up power, some do serve some other purpose. Some rooms are time-based challenges where you try to power up all the bumpers before time expires, others throw out hazards (and you'll often have to hit the bumpers that shoot out the danger to deactivate them), while others are accuracy checks where you try to aim your shots at a well-protected target. Completing these challenges will usually just reward you with bonus power (and a ton of it at that), but a few unlock secret paths that lead to neat rewards. I liked most of the challenges, but some of them can be pretty rough when you aren't used to the mechanics yet. While it may seem like everything in the game is building up to some intense boss fight with the creature, you don't actually fight him directly. Instead, at the end of each dungeon, the creature attempts to thwart your plans to restore the machine by throwing you into a gauntlet of three or four challenge rooms, where the goal is to clear out all the bumpers without dying. It's perhaps the closest thing to full-on combat you'll get in the game since you really have to mind your position both to get your shots in and to avoid damage, and some of them were pretty tough. Thankfully, dying isn't that punishing, since dungeon progress is saved (the bumpers in individual rooms reset, though), you can heal up in the hub world, and you can even spend power to open up a portal so you can quickly warp to the boss encounter without running through the entire dungeon. On that note, bumpers come in all shapes and sizes, and some offer gimmicks. There are bumpers with timers on them (which you'll have to charge before the timer expires, else the room will reset), bulb things arranged in a line that you have to light up in a single, well-aimed shot (often involving bouncing an orb at the right angle against something), bumpers that spit out damaging fire orbs when you hit them, bumpers that shoot out lasers on a predetermined cycle, bumpers that spit out slow tracking projectiles that can be destroyed by a moving orb, and even bumpers that explode if they happen to get hit by a ball. There are also other mechanics on top of that, like tracks on which certain bumpers move about, a switch that changes what bumpers are currently active in a room, and turrets that shoot out the orbs you need to wallop. The variety is solid, I would say. The secret rewards are well worth finding, in my view, as they allow you to customize your robot dude. You can find alternate weapons for both your regular attack and your charge attack, and many of them offer unique passive to change up the way you play. For example, the Focus Hammer makes it so if you hold the regular strike, time slows down to give you a brief moment to line up your shot. In the case of the charge tools, one example is the Magnetic Fork, which attracts orbs flying close to you when you're charging. I do wish there were a greater variety of these tools to try out, but what the game did have, I thought was neat. Plus, there were instances where switching out my tools worked to my benefit, and I really like that there's no one optimal loadout. In addition, you can also find capes (which are purely cosmetic) and Old Cores, which you can take to the engineer in the desert town to power up your robot core. Doing so allows any orbs you charge to hold more energy, thus allowing them to charge bumpers much faster and yield more power on contact. Upgrading your core costs power, and this is the only other thing you can spend it on. It did make me wish there were other things to spend power on (since I ended up with quite the surplus towards the end of the game), but I'm just glad there was even one other thing it was good for. There are only around eight dungeons in the game, and most of them are quite short (especially if you skip the optional stuff). I did go out of my way to fully explore every dungeon, and I'd say it was worthwhile to collect everything. And I also like that, while there is usually nothing to do in the hub world, there are some secrets hidden about within it, and I was a big fan of how clearing one of the main dungeons unlocks something special in the desert town. VERDICT: I thought Creature in the Well was a fun, new take on the usual dungeon crawler, eschewing the typical hack-and-slash combat for a fresh spin on pinball, of all things. Though I did find struggles with the controls, I really liked the core mechanic of walloping orbs to hit bumpers, and I enjoyed the variety of gimmicks and challenges they constructed around this gameplay. I also quite liked the game's art style, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ability to swap out your gear to change up your orb-whacking approach. Perhaps the only things I could say against the game are how I wish it were longer and it had more stuff in it, but I think that only speaks to how much I liked it and want to play more of it. If anything about what I described in terms of the gameplay sounds interesting to you, I recommend giving Creature in the Well a shot. I don't think there's any other game quite like it, and that uniqueness alone merits checking it out. Pick your poison, PC players: - end -
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June 2024
Derryck
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