Animal Well

Billy Basso hands out Animal Well's loose ends slowly to avoid overload. Each unresolved door adds mental load, so Basso paces open questions across the world map. He avoids designs like a room with six doors leading to different areas.

Basso: "I am conscious of how many things I am dangling in front of the player at any given time." Mark Brown contrasts this with Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, whose locked doors, boxes, safes and clocks swamp the player.

One-way breakable walls give shortcuts without adding open questions. Instead of a locked door between two rooms, Basso uses a destructible wall that can only be blown up from the right-hand side. It still creates a shortcut, but from the left the player has no idea a path exists.

The point is that a locked door seen early becomes one more unanswered question the player carries around, while a hidden one-way wall does not.

Animal Well layers mysteries so only the hardest need community help. Basso builds the game in three layers, from an easy game everyone can finish to maddening puzzles. In one, a hint on a drawable mural is split into 50 pieces assigned randomly to players, so they must pool them to solve it.

Basso: "I think when a game is hard, it's actually an opportunity for [players] to bond with each other and have this shared experience." Brown groups this with Fez, which needs only 32 cubes to finish, and Tunic's two endings, as ways of deciding which mysteries are required and which are optional.