Triple Click - Triple Play: Animal Well (with Russ Frushtick)

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Animal Well is one of the best video game surprises in recent memory, and we'll be talking about it for years. This week Jason, Maddy, and special guest Russ Frushtick (Polygon, The Besties) give their impressions of the game in three increasingly obsessive phases.One More Thing:Maddy: Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (she finished it!)Jason: Minishoot AdventuresLINKS:Russ's gaming podcast The Besties and his Polygon review of Animal WellTriple Click LIVE in LA! Saturday, June 8, 6:30PM at the Teragram Ballroom: https://teragramballroom.com/tm-event/triple-click-podcast/Preorder Jason’s Book! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jason-schreier/play-nice/9781538725429/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Obviously, you've listened to all 204 episodes up until this episode, but have you collected all of the hidden eggs? Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about Animal Well, a Metroidvania that isn't about combat. It's about environmental puzzles that might invade your dreams. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Schreier. My name is Russ Fras and I the best game of the week. Who is this person?

What's going on? What's going on triple-cliffe? Hello, Russ Fresh Dick. Kirk Gimilton is still out. So we have a special guest host today. Every podcast must start that way that I'm on. So there's really, there's nothing I can really do about it. Gotcha.

Yeah, you really couldn't go with our format. We tried. Just throw us a bone here. No. Couldn't do it. The triple click thing. Russ is, of course, one of the co-hosts of our friend podcast, the besties. and Russ works at Maddie

and the resties some of the time yeah also the resties occasionally yes so we just we pulled Russ in because you know we did how many times can we do double click in a row you know what I mean we needed it to be three people Maddie you know what's really fun about having Russ here is that you can explain to him all about maximum fun I can because Russ has no idea

at all what the maximum fun network even is but it's actually the name of our podcast network that we're on. And for us, you're not going to believe this, but if you were to go to maximum fund.org slash join, you would be able to join the podcast network that we're on. You'd be able to support our show. You'd be able to click a little tiki box next to the words triple click. And as part of your sign-up process, you'd be supporting us. And then once you did that, you'd be able to get a monthly bonus episode from us. And there's a bunch of really good ones in there. There's like a huge backlog of like we did final.

Fantasy 7 Rebirth, like full spoilers on that. We did a recent one about the Fallout TV show. This coming month, we're going to do triple cook where we talk about cooking. I don't know what that's going to be like. I love it. Maximumfundorix slash join is where you would go if you wanted to support the show and get bonus apps. And also, just while I'm here, while I'm talking, I'm going to say, once again, we have a live show coming up in Los Angeles. It's on Saturday, June 8th.

doors are at 6.30 p.m. It's at the Terragam ballroom. And Kirk is going to be there. Russ, I don't know if you're going to be there, but you should be. Russ, are you coming to our live show? I'm not going to be there, but I did hear that you guys are giving away PS5s to everyone who attends. That's really exciting. You barely heard that.

That's not corroborated anyway, and I haven't personally heard that at all. But Russ has heard it from some way. It's true. We will be lying out. It's going to be like a Kai Senate deal all over again. It's going to be great. Well, I was going to say we will be handing out Photoshop fives to everyone who attends. You are correct.

Yeah, yeah. We'll be handing out post-strip fives. We'll be photoshopping the letter five and handing it out to every single person who buys a ticket to our live show. So please do come. It's going to be really fun. And Jason and Kirk and I will have been playing some games at Summer Game Fest. So we'll be talking about that during that live show because it's right in that window. Yeah, I'm booking my schedule right now.

And it is a nightmare. It is. We're going to have played so many games, though, because we are booked. Well, hopefully. I mean, the problem is that you have to go to three different places, so you have to account for our scheduling time. But we'll talk more about this closer to the end. The listeners can hear about that on June 8th when we're fresh off of having dealt with it. It's true. The live show, we're just going to complain about L.A. traffic for us all in a hour.

Yeah, I was going to be like, oh, my God, the traffic. I was in a lift for an hour. The five. Yeah. I love going to L.A. and hearing about seeing things in person that podcasters talk about all the time. Because as a Bostonian. I don't know what the Grove is, but it's over there. Jason, what are we talking about today? It's not L.A.

Today we are talking about Animal Well. Once again, Maddie, you and I kind of teased at it a little bit last week, but we decided to do a deep dive into the game. And since Russ and I have been talking about it and kind of exchanging esoteric hints up to opaque hints about our progress and whatnot over the last few weeks, I figured it would be good to bring him on. So, real quick, Animal Well, just came out. It'll be about a week old as we air this episode. It's developed by a single guy, Billy Basso, who worked on it for seven years. I just published a story about the development of that game and his journey on it over on Bloomberg.com. And so it is best described as kind of

of like a cross between Metroid and Outer Wilds of Metroidvania with lots and lots of secrets and three different layers as I described last time. And so the way we're going to have this conversation is we're actually going to talk about all three of the layers. So we're going to, this conversation is going to progress in kind of, the spoilers are going to increase as we go. So first we're going to talk about the basics, which is kind of layer one, the kind of core, Metroidvania of it all. You're going around, collecting objects and solving puzzles and exploring. And then we're going to talk about... And then Leonardo DiCaprio goes, we have to go deeper. And then we're going to go another layer. And then we go in the dream within the dream. It's funny you make that

joke because there actually is an inception puzzle in the game. Is there? Okay. I didn't even know that. But that makes sense. That makes sense. Layer two is the kind of the elaborate kind of backtracking, secret hunting that you have to do, and this is kind of the completionist layer. Basically, once you've done one and two, you've beaten the game, and layer two is kind of a harder version of layer one. Layer three is when things just go batch shit, and you have to go and do ARG-ish stuff and collaborate with other people and solve ridiculous puzzles that I think the internet's still, as of this recording, probably by the time we air this, everyone will figure everything out,

but as of this recording, people have not. I have my doubts, Jason. Yeah, it's possible. I would be surprised if everyone has figured everything else. Well, at least all the bunnies. We'll get into that. We will get into it. I do want to mention before we start really diving into it,

I have kind of a deep-seated ethos against what we're here to do. About talking about it? Because you want people to not be spoiled on this game anyway, right? I really don't want. So there's a level zero where Russ is like just playing. animal well before you listen to the app. Yeah. Yeah.

And I realize we're going to dive into it. But like so much of the magic of this game lives and dies off of you discovering stuff for yourself and figuring out how the world works and stuff like that. And every single time that you hear someone say something about a bunny, for example, it takes a little, it's like a little bit of my soul dies and Billy's soul dies at the same time. We share a soul. I don't know if you guys knew that. Is that a puzzle?

This is how far off the deep end rest has gotten. I mean, he titled his review, don't spoil animal well for yourself. And I let him keep that title. And a lot of the review is pretty unhinged. That's a great title. This is a good preface. I think by the time, so this episode, we're recording a week in advance because of scheduling shenanigans.

By the time this episode airs, I think a fair number of our listeners will have played it already. And so, yes, this is. your warning, if you are interested in this game and you don't want, you kind of want to go in pristine as Russ would prefer you go in, then now is the time to stop listening and just press pause and come back once you've played it. But I think that a lot of people listening will have some familiarity, maybe even they've collected all the eggs by now. So let's get into it. Let's start with some initial kind of broad impressions. Russ and I have been kind of obsessed,

but Maddie, I actually want to hear from you first. How far have you gotten? And would do you think so far? I mean, I'm pretty far. I'm in layer two. I'm getting eggs. I haven't, I haven't fully lost my mind. I haven't, you know, gotten into whatever level you two are in, where you're talking about like a puzzle that requires, you know, dozens of people collaborating in order to solve it. I haven't gotten to that stage. But I feel like I want to go back and talk just about my experience trying out the game so that we can just talk about level, one or layer one for a second together first and like what that experience was like. So we got a code for Animal Well at Polygon, just one.

And I took it because I was like, oh, this is a Metroidvania. Like, I'm Maddie Myers. What am I going to do? Not be the person that takes an indie game code for a Metroidvania. And I also was like, this is probably going to be pretty cut and dry. Like, I'm just going to review this game myself at some point. I'm not really going to worry about it. And then I started playing it.

And yeah, like for the first hour so, I was like, oh, this is really cool. Like really minimalist pixel art, really cool music. And then the more I played, the more I was like, this game's puzzle design is so incredibly detailed. It has fully ensconced me. I don't want to stop playing. Like, I also had a Hades 2 technical test code at the time. And I thought I was addicted to Hades 2.

No, I was like full on into Animal Wellfer. like a week and I was just like I'm so into this and then Russ I think you got a code just from your podcast right and then you DM me about it yeah and then I started being like this game deserves like a full review and also Russ you beat it before I did because you're a super genius and you could tell your own version of this when we get to you but I was just like we need to not only review this game this game is a huge deal and then just separately from that they sent us some more codes And then I started becoming an animal well evangelist at Polygon.com and just trying to convince more and more of my co-workers to take a code just so that they get talked to me about animal well. So now we're in that level.

We're tons of people at Polygon are playing it. And like we've finally reached as we record this, the stage where people in the regular world are playing animal well. But Russ, I want to hear from you about what your level one was like and what you hit in terms of your emotional stages of being like, this is not just any old indie metroids. vanya game. This is something really special and really cool. Good question. So I played Animal Well like two or maybe even three years ago. Whoa. This was a preview build. I don't think it was in early access. I don't know that it ever did that, but I know that there was a preview build that I was sent and just looking at the screenshot. I was like, oh, I'll play this. And I played for probably about an hour. And it was a very, not that early, because visually speaking, in terms of production,

it was all like more or less where it is in the final game. But the map was like not really designed. It was kind of like a bite-sized version of what you see in the final game. And I played for about an hour and I was like, oh, this is incredibly my shit. I'm not going to play anymore. Yeah. Which is a common sort of situation for me where I'll just like play something in early access and be like, I want to see what the fittest version is like because this like half finished is not doing it for me.

Here I was so attached to what I played that I was like, I'm just going to mark my calendar. And there's so many other games to play. I'm not like hurting for games. So I can wait until it's out, out. And man, I am thrilled that I did because it has just been like a delight. I think Maddie, you and I probably play a comparable number of Metroidvenas. And there is no analog for this game in the genre. It's very quiet and focused.

You could argue like Metroid certainly is. Sure. But this is like even way more opaque, mysterious, just sort of like gaseous like puzzle box that you're trying to solve. Yeah. And it just feels like a different thing entirely. I think the closest analog people have said feds. I think Outer Wilds is also, you mentioned a fair comparison. It is, it's really doing something that does not happen very often.

and when I get to play these games that I can like go in completely blind and try to solve it myself. Yes. It's such a satisfaction to like really be able to like crack it open. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about layer one. So I've been obsessed with this game for for weeks now. And I think that like the experience both of you had is a pretty common one.

It's one I had as well where you kind of, you start playing. And maybe if you're like us, you've seen a glut of Metroidvania games this year, starting with the Prince of Persia game and then just one after another to the point where you're like, God, like, I don't know how many more of these I can take. Well, I don't think that, but sure, maybe Jason. Nor do I. I don't know. Maddie, did you finish, like, Tales of Kansara? That game has some really tricky platforming parts that I eventually was like, maybe I'll come back to this. And I may or may not. Okay, fair enough. But Jason's point is right. Like, there is burnout. Because I have the experience of you like, I don't know if I could do enough. other Metroidvania. But anyway, so you play this and you're, okay, maybe not. Maybe you're addicted to Metrovanias, but maybe it's like me, you are like, not another one of these,

but wait, there's something a little bit more here. There's something a little bit stickier here than kind of your average Metroidvania game where it's like, up, here's the double jump, up, I got the dash again this time. One of the, one of the kind of appeal points, one of, one of the reasons it's so sticky is because it's so different and it feels so different. You could already tell from the aesthetics, from the way it's lit, from the way everything moves, from the way you're seeing these kind of haunting, like, strange-looking animals, ostriches, and dogs and a squirrel that keeps kind of leading you around. But I think the biggest factor and the thing that will really keep people sucked in once they get in an hour or two into it is the items and how bizarre and

unique they are. There's no other Metroidvania where you're getting a yo-yo or a slinky, and it's so creative. Or even the bubble wand being the double jump was just immediately fascinating to me. Right. I was going to say, I think you can judge a Metroidvania by how creative it is design-wise, by how long it takes before you unlock the double jump. Because the double jump is such a staple. And even though arguably you do get the double jump in a way very early through the bubble wand. It's such an interesting approach to that power

that it feels like something completely different and really can be utilized in way more ways than just, oh, I can jump up a little bit higher. So that's another trick of this game is that not a single item in the game can only be used in one way. They all have multiple uses.

And on top of that, most of the puzzles in the game can be solved in multiple ways. Like there are a few different solutions you can find to, I mean, one of the classic ones is at a certain, or pretty early in the game, you find these dogs,

and they chase you and they try to rip you apart if they see you. It's like, you play as this little pillow-looking thing. I kind of, I wonder if you're like a pillow, and the dogs are just trying to. I called them an egg man. Egg man. You play it. Well, you're hunting eggs, though.

Yeah. Yeah, Russ called him an egg, and now I see, I see myself as an egg. But you look a little, like, Kirby also. You're just like a little spherical thing. Sure, a little, a little spooky curvy, we'll call him. And you get, you're going to see these dogs, they try to rip you apart. And then early on you get this frisbee and you realize, oh, dogs, dogs, that's, frisbee is the weakness for dogs. Yeah.

This is how you solve the dog problem. Yeah. But then later on, you'll get other objects and those other objects also can help solve the dog problem in other ways. So, like, you find that if you're creative with the tools, you can really solve puzzles in all sorts of different methods. And so you really, you start to realize, and then you start solving the puzzles, and you start exploring. and seeing the kind of interlocking nature of the map and the design. You start to realize like, oh, okay, this is the central room. This is where I'm kind of moving out from as I go.

And you start to realize how brilliant this game is and how different it is and how unlike pretty much any other Metroidvania I've played, it is. Yeah. I don't think I've ever played a game in my life that gave me a slinky. By the way, like some of these items, I'm like, I don't even know how you came up with it. It's actually a slink for copyright reasons. But I guess Ness had a yo-yo, is that right? Or Lucas maybe?

I mean, Earthbound, that's like a JRP. You don't even see. No, sure. I'm just trying to think of like analogs. But it's similar, where it's like the idea of like a children's toy being in a video game and like having a power is sort of an evocative idea. But even just like why would you be calling phones to save was like just an immediate visual signifier.

Well, you mentioned Earthbound. That's something you do in Earth. actually. Oh, yeah, I didn't know it. Yeah, that's true. Okay, yeah. I've wondered that myself. It's very, it's very weird. And I'm also like, well, maybe I'm talking to two people who know why I'm calling on a phone.

That's the thing that this game does to you over time. Like, we're not at level two yet, but like, part of the game is that over the course of it, you start being like, well, what does all of this mean? Because these objects seem completely random. And the different kinds of animals, like, they're from different real life biomes. So it's like, why would any of these animals be in this collection?

It's very weird. Like, that's a well. They're just in a well, man. Yeah, they're just in a well full of animals. And I think that's part of the charm of the game and part of what makes it so creative and also kind of otherworldly and spooky and under your skin because you're just like, I don't know. It kind of reminds me when I was a child playing Mario where I was just like, why would

any of these things be here? Like, why is there a toad guy? There's no answer to that. Why are Gumbas and Cupa's friends? Yeah. I mean, I still don't really have an answer to that. An Animal Well is a similar kind of weird world where they're just nouns and they're just there.

And I don't know why they are the way they are. Hedgehogs and Chinchillas sort of walking around each other for some reason. Yeah. Happy bearers and bats. You don't know what you're going to see. It's dream logic. It's its own kind of strange dream. logic and the way that the items interact with them is also it also follows its own kind of strange

Mario-esque dream logic and then yeah as you're playing the kind of so that that early that layer one the metrovania stuff I think it hooked us all and that's it's kind of like I was talking to billy basso about some of the stuff and the design choices he made and one of the things he told me is that he started off being really inspired by fez and the reason he was inspired by fez is because fez did something that a lot of other games don't do which is that it had these secrets hidden in the background and you didn't know to look for them until later on. And once you knew to look for them, you were like, holy crap, these are here the whole time. So that was kind of what inspired him. And so he did that and we'll get into that in a bit. But I was talking to Billy about this and

Billy said something that I thought was really interesting and smart, which is that there's no way to get players to care about those secrets in the first place unless they're into the game. And so you have to kind of build a core game that players really enjoy. And the fact that he was able to do that, just as this kind of like first time. I mean, he worked at some game studios before, but he never created his own game. And he was working on like mobile free-to-play stuff or like healthcare-related games.

So nothing like this. The fact that for his first time he was able to do something so polished and sticky and solid, like it was just really impressive. So God, I hope it came out good. He did, yeah. And the first few years he did nights and weekends as like while he was working on his day job. And then in the summer of 2020,

he wound up connecting with this guy, Dan Edelman, who wound up becoming his business partner. And then at that point, he quit his job and was like, I'm going to crunch to just finish this thing over the next couple of years. Yeah, self-crunch. I do want to mention, you're talking about kind of the onboarding. And I think we've talked about Outer Wilds a few times. Outer Wilds took me like three or four tries for it to click for me. I think the first five hours of Outer Wilds are the hardest by far. I agree.

And I think this is a really good representation. of another way to do that. And I think Billy was right. You get players hooked on an experience that is relatively approachable, mysterious and, like, tricky at times. But for the most part, like, you're not dying every two seconds. You're not crashing into a tornado. Here, you actually feel like you're getting your feet wet.

And then, so by the time you're hooked, they can start throwing those real curveballs, and it doesn't feel like you're getting punished too hard. I think other games like Spalunky as well are, like, really harsh to get into, but have some amazing secrets within them, but you really have to work to find them, and here you're kind of just, like, eased into it. Yeah, it's a very seamless experience. You do not have to, yeah, it is not one of those games, like the Souls games, or you're like, you know, just stick with it. Like, you really don't have to. And what's really brilliant about it is that it feels really approachable, but also, even from the very beginning, it encourages the kind of nonlinear

thinking or thinking outside of the box that you need for the, for even the deeper parts, the secret parts. And the perfect example of that is the ghost dog. that chases you early on you find a ghost dog i won't i won't for rest of sake i won't explain the solution but basically in order to solve this problem i did figure it out well that's the thing it takes a little while and sometimes you have to be like you know what screw this i'm going to come back later i'm going to go explore some more and figure this out or i'm going to go like take a shower and just stare at the wall and so i figure it out you're like oh okay this is this is fair this doesn't it doesn't feel like something where the game is screwing me over anything like that but i had to think a little bit

outside of the box and it's kind of training you for the future secret hunting in a really smart way that I thought was really cool. You have to bypass the ghost dog, or you have to get past the ghost dog in a way that most people wouldn't think to do. And that makes sense. I mean, I also think, I mean, I also don't want to give a specific example because I'm also trying to respect rest's wishes. But I feel like we've sort of alluded to this, but each of the traversal items that you get, they each have traversal abilities, I would discover their secondary abilities by accident. I think every time, just by virtue of using them and being like, oh, if I do this or if I

jump here by the item, it does that. And that would not happen right away at all. Like sometimes it would be like two hours later. And I'd be like, I could have been doing that with the item the whole time. What? And then you think of like a thousand places you can go back to and be like, oh, that's how I get there. I didn't need a new item.

at all, which is like typically how a Metroidvania works. Like you see, you know, someplace you're like, well, I guess I'm going to need super missiles for that or something. Or like, I'm going to be able to break those blocks later probably. In this game, it doesn't feel that way at all. You're instead just kind of like, well, I'm running into obstacles all the time and I may or may not ever be able to surpass them. And I just have a bunch of weird toys in my pocket.

And then eventually you're like, I didn't even know the toy could do that. And I guess that obstacle wasn't an obstacle after all because I didn't really. that this dumb toy I had could do this other thing, which is a pretty fascinating way to use traversal items, to not only be like, okay, you're collecting new traversal items all the time, but to also be like, there actually aren't that many total. It's just that you're going to want to mess with the ones that you have a little bit and just kind of be like, well, what happens if I use this item near this enemy? Anything? Is it going to react in some type of way? And you're going to want to do that with like all the items, as it turns out? That was wild to me.

And there might be more items than you think. Oh. We'll see. We'll see. We're being so good here. Russ dropping spoilers right on cue. Are we ready for level two? Are we ready to talk about eggs?

Yeah, let's get into this. So, okay, so then, so you kind of, quote, unquote, beat the game. You get to the credits, and you've gotten past the kind of core Metroidvania stuff. And then you start to realize, like, oh, there's a lot more to do in here. You kind of, you uncover a few, you find a few more. tantalizing mysteries. You wind up back where you started, maybe with a couple of new items,

as Russ alluded to. And then you're like, huh, okay, what do I do now? And you start to realize that the next part of the game involves hunting for eggs and that there are these eggs, which you probably found a bunch of at this point. So you know that collecting eggs does something. In fact, you probably realize that

there's a big room full of eggs and that you can kind of unlock different parts of it. So at this point, you're like, oh, okay. And then this is a point. I remember I was actually texting or Discord messaging with you, Russ, and I was like, you know, I don't know if I really have it in me to go and backtrack this entire world just looking for eggs. This is the naive, naive Jason before I really got suckered in. Because you kind of, you might be exhausted at this point after all the Metroidvania ing. And maybe you're like, I don't really know if I want to do that.

And then it starts sucking you in. These are the ebbs and flow, the highs and lows. I'm actually curious, what is it that gets you over that feeling? Like, what was it that, like, got you over that feeling of, I don't know that I want to keep going? Yeah, I don't know. I think it was just kind of the gradual realization that I had, like, barely discovered anything in this world. Like, I'll just get a couple more eggs. I mean, yeah, so something you realize, one of the tricks, one of the kind of tips, if I were writing a classic Kitaku, like, what to know before you play, tips post,

one of the classic tips I would give is look out for black spaces. on your map. Like look out because there's the entire map essentially should be filled out. Although even today like we still don't we still have a few black spaces but look out for black spaces and what you realize is that like those are like the entire map is so well designed and intricate that like every single place where you think it's just kind of an empty space there's actually something hidden there. And once you start to realize that and realize all of the different possibilities you can uncover it actually makes it a lot more fun to keep going and backtracking and going through those rooms.

Yeah, I will echo that and also add to it by saying, at this point, you're in level two. Chances are you've collected at least, I think it's 16 eggs to unlock what, what in my opinion, is the most useful item in the entire game. And it's the pencil. Yes. You unlock a pencil. It's wild that they bar you from that, by the way.

Like, once I got the pencil, I was like, really? You're going to let me have this now. Well, how many games... Okay, so the pencil, as people who are in this stage of the game probably know, allows you to write on the map using, like, kind of an awkward, like, pixel cursor thing. But you can, like, literally draw on it. So you can do a happy face. You can do, like, I was writing, like, there's a spot on the map where I thought I saw a cave wolf.

So I wrote Cave Wolf at that one spot. I was going to bring that up a little later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So... This has become an inside joke on the... the reviewers discord because Russ thought that a groundhog was a cave wolf and so now we just call everything

cave wolf. I wasn't going to question it. I was just like, didn't know that was a cave wolf. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut. Russ knows more than me. I don't know. I don't know what all the animals are. But my map at this point is like a crazy person's map. Like it is like the Unabomber's

notebook basically. It is Charlie Day. Connecting the pieces of strength. And some of that stuff is relevant and some of it isn't and I don't always know what is important versus not, but it does make the game much more fun when you're not constantly like, where the, where was that ghost dog? I know there was a ghost dog somewhere. Where did he spawn? Where was the disc? So long as you're really diligent, there's also stamps that you get very early on to like mark certain spots. And both of those in tandem will make the game so much more fun because you won't have to like constantly be like blindly walking around

trying to remember that room that you remembered six hours ago. So I would strongly recommend that. Yeah, the pencil definitely helps. Yeah, I think that was one of the kind of the frustration points for me also is just kind of being like, oh, where was that thing again? But when you're still in level two, I mean, there's so much to discover that even just kind of aimlessly wandering for a while will get you new eggs every time. Yeah.

The big kind of like, I don't know, the down moment, the kind of nadee for me was like around 50 something, maybe even like early 60s eggs when it's just like you have just a couple left to find. That was when I resorted to going to the Discord and being like, hey, does anyone know which ones I'm missing? Like, give me some clues here. And there's this guy. Shout out to Andrew Stretch in the Discord who has been a superhero because he kept

track of where each egg was based on the ones you have missing. So he can give out clues based on that, which is very helpful. Now, nowadays, like now they're guys everywhere for us playing it. It was a very different kind of experience. But I would also add, like, there are mechanics in the game, even without help, that point to where those eggs are. So you are not totally blind. Yes. You don't have the entire map to search for one egg.

There are methods in the game that I won't talk about because I do think that's a little further into spoiler territory that will help you along. The comparison that I gave was, like, in Tears of the Kingdom, there's a method that you can do to, like, find all the frogs in Tears of the Kingdom. something similar to that that helps kind of narrow things down a little bit. Yeah, it does, although when you're up to like 63 eggs and you're like, oh my God, like that can be a little frustrating. Those last

like four or five eggs probably took me yeah, probably three or four hours to find. Yeah, yeah. And then yeah, you get to this point, I think, when you're really just, the game is firing on all cylinders and you realize you really just like start to realize how ingenious it is and you

even start to notice, and this is a really fun part, even while you're doing the level two stuff, you start to notice some of the puzzles that you'll then be solving in layer three. Maybe you start to realize that there's a little marking here that is kind of like familiar looking. And then you realize that there are markings everywhere that you are. And you realize that the entire game is full of these secrets hidden in the background that you like didn't even think to look at it. You didn't even think we're important. Yeah. It will, it will really start to tease in.

And you'll find some of the late game secrets early on. Like you'll literally like uncover like a rabbit, for example. And that might lead to something deeper. But they really do kind of are very subtle in terms of how they roll those out. Yeah. And when you load a game, when you go to your load save files, there's like a little counter for eggs and a little counter for bunnies. And you realize that the bunnies are important too, which leads us into level three.

we'll be pretty vague here. Don't worry. You don't want to spoil me. We don't have to get into super spoilers. But the way I see it is kind of after you complete all the eggs, you'll go through a whole thing. And then you'll get to this new like kind of sequence, this new area of the game essentially where you are now, you now have to go and find bunnies. I would say beating layers one and two is basically beating the game.

Like the bunny hunt is kind of like the true like, um, sicko mode. Yeah, as we say. It's like, this is the real, this is, I don't know, the platinum trophy, the true achievement and hunting. You've been well-pilled at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Full-on animal well-pilled. But at this point, you start to realize that there are puzzles that go so much deeper and are so

much more complicated than anything else you had seen before, and we're still trying to figure them all out. just to give a couple of vague examples. One of them involves, like, more than one of them actually involve devices that don't, that, like, you have to, the supplementary devices that aren't your game system that you have to plug in or like use in other ways. One of them, and I'll just straight up say this because like you need to know it. There's one of these puzzles can only be solved by working together with dozens of other. people because every single copy of the game has a unique little puzzle piece and you have to assemble this giant puzzle using pieces collected from everybody. I think that one was just solved like

the day after release because we had we didn't have enough puzzle pieces to do it before release. Yeah, when we were doing it in the reviewers Discord, we had I think about 20 or 22 puzzles pieces and I think there were 50 or so in total. So there was yeah, just no possible. way we could have done it, but obviously, yeah, having the internet at our side. Yeah, now it's way more people potentially. And honestly, even having all the pieces, like, unless you, like, straight up look at, like, the finished product, it's real, I'm, I'm in the process still of, like, trying to put it all together as, like, a puzzle, as, like, almost a jigsaw puzzle, and it's still pretty

tricky to do. So there's still plenty of stuff. That being said, yeah, please don't just look up an image. because there's just so much of this that is such a delight if you really take the time. I genuinely considered, like, printing everything out and just, like, cutting them out and, like, assembling them on my floor, which would have been pretty fun. It's that sort of game, man. Yeah. Yeah.

And so we think, so nobody's found all the bunnies as of this recording. Maybe by the time we publish, people will have found all the bunnies. I think we're at about 15 now. Yeah, out of, like, 20, I think. Do you know how many it's out of? Does it tell you that? We think it's 20, but we don't know for sure. Okay.

And it could be that like once you find 20, there's a whole new thing. Because we think that there are like some other codes and secrets that go even beyond. Maybe there's a hidden layer four that we haven't even kind of started to uncover yet. But actually, Russ, something I was curious to talk to you a little bit about is the process of solving this. So we were playing pre-release. There was no way to look things up on the internet. But still, I think, and I encourage players to kind of get together either in Discord maybe the triple-click Discord and the Animal Wallchat in there,

or like with just friends who are playing it, and really, without looking things up, try to collaborate and figure it out, the way that a lot of people, including the two of us, did for Destiny Raids, where we were just kind of like going in blind and trying to figure out what the mechanics all meant. This is a much more intense version of those.

Russ, tell me a little bit about what your experience was like in that pre-release reviewers' Discord, just kind of gradually piecing together all of those. secrets. Yeah, so I'm kind of a snob and a little bit of an asshole when it comes to this stuff, but I'm like very spoiler paranoid, especially for games that I love. I was like this with Tears of the Kingdom and certainly like this with Animal Well. And I really wanted to go as far as I possibly could on my own to see how much I could uncover before kind of enlisting the help of others. And using my, whatever, just me playing the game, I was able to find all the eggs and find

probably about eight of the rabbits. Some of them are like way more obvious than others, but I found about eight of them and sort of hit a wall. And that's more or less when I started like latching more into the, into the discord. Before that, I was playing with Griffin and we were just sharing like notes back and forth. And I do think like until you get probably 10 rabbits deep,

a room of about five to 10 people is probably the sweet spot. anything larger than that, you kind of run the risk of like, oh, someone's going to walk and, like, look up something and then to, like, pretend they figured it out, that kind of thing. But with five to ten people you trust, I think you'll, like, have an amazing, amazing time just kind of piecing this all together. And that's how it was.

And now that I'm, like, past that point where we have this room of, again, it's still, like, 20 people. I know that there's, like, a main discord that has, like, hundreds of people playing the game right now. I haven't gone in it. intentionally, because I know that there are people that are now, like, have found things that I haven't found. And I'd rather, at the very least, have a buddy being like, oh, maybe you should look into this. And I can still have some sort of puzzle to piece together rather than it just

being, like, spoon-fed to me. Yeah, but the process of doing that is just so unique and interesting. I mean, because of the nature of the game, it's kind of like, we all kind of gradually realized that there was almost nothing, like every stone had to be uncovered. Every, like, bad shit idea, no matter how bonkers it seemed, we had to try. There was a moment where I was staring at the kangaroo, who's obviously very frequently present. Yeah, even in level one, you're going to run into it. And watching the kangaroo's ears, and I would be like, okay, so when he's facing this way,

his left ear points to the left, and when he's facing the other way, his right ear points to the right. and maybe there's a pattern and if I go to all the spots where the kangaroo spawns maybe he'll have some sort of secret key for me using his ears. Like in Morse code or something? Yeah, I've since decided, but I don't know for sure, that that's not anything.

Like, I don't think there's a kangaroo code. But that's the sort of mindset that you get into. And if you were to like chat with someone and not know the context of what they were talking about, you would think they were fully, fully insane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because you just don't know in this game, because of the nature of it,

you don't know if even like random, what appears to be random background art. Like, you have no idea if that's, like, part of some elaborate secret. You have no idea if an enemy pattern is just like they're kind of, I don't know, just designed to, so you can dodge them just like a standard enemy AI, or if it's a secret that's showing you some sort of code that you have to figure out. So Billy Bassett when I was interviewing him, he told me that, like, he stuck in some secrets that were so quote-unquote unreasonable to his words that he expects and even hopes that nobody will ever find them. And he'll be happy if people do. But like still, he thinks that there's some stuff in there. It could take years to find if ever, if it's ever found. He made comparisons to like the big hunt that people were making for the shadow of the colossus, like 17th Colossus back in the day. I was thinking, Russell will appreciate this about the secret sixth chest or seventh chest, whatever it was, in the vault of glass back in the, I remember that, that mystery. We did an episode of a split screen about the secret hunters of destiny.

And this stuff is just so cool. And it seems like the game has been a big success, which makes me very happy because it's cool to see a game like this get rewarded. Secret hunting, man. And maybe there'll be another one. I also know for what it's worth, I think Dan Aylman, while we were in the review process, created a website. I don't know the exact you were all offhand, but it's something along the lines of, are all the secrets an animal well found?

And it just says no. So if you're ever stressed about the idea that maybe you have found all the secrets, there is a website to indicate whether you have indeed. Yeah, just go check that out. I think, so I hit a wall in level three where I was like, you know, I don't have the time or the brain power to like handle,

to find the rest of these secrets, but I'll just kind of watch from a distance. And I've been enjoying that too, just kind of watching, keeping up with the Discord and watching people find 15th bunny, 16th money, so on and so on, which I've enjoyed. But yes, the process, if you are extremely smart, smarter than I am, and you have a good group of pals. See if you can find all the monies yourselves. See if you can figure it out. There was stuff in there that I've now found that I saw probably a dozen times before actually getting to the moment where I realized there was a secret there. Like, literally was, like, playing through moments in the areas in the game that were just

totally hiding in plain sight secrets. That once my brain clicked, oh, that's the secret, it was, like, a total, like, mind-blowing experience. And that's just why Animal Well is so special. It's, like, it just warps your brain into really just being incredibly paranoid. And I've been having, literally, I've been having, like, Tetris Effect dreams about this game. I had a dream where I was running through in animal whale, like, seeing signs in areas that I hadn't previously seen signs before. And then waking up and being like, no, that didn't, there's no fucking sign there.

So it's, yeah, it's one of those sorts of games. So how much longer, Russ, do you think you're going to keep trying to do the bunny hunt yourself? I'm going to keep doing it the way I've been doing it, which is like, again, I got, you know, using our group, we got to about 14, I think. and now our group is starting to utilize a little bit of help from the internet. But even then, once all the bunnies are found, I'm going to use the friends that we've formed within that Discord to basically just like,

hey, maybe, like, I was asking for, like, what quadrant would something be in or something like that? Just as a way to, like, nudge me. Because the map at some point, at a certain point, it just gets too big. And, like, scrubbing through it for every tiny little detail is too hard.

but when they do give me that nudge and I am like led to what the actual like puzzle is waiting for me oh man so much fun to figure it out I spent probably about a half hour figuring out one this morning and it was like almost led by the nose and it still took me a while to figure out so it's really great it's a special game Maddie do you think you're going to do any bunny hunting

or do you think you'll stop after the eggs? I think I am I mean you probably have one have you found one bunny maybe No. Well, no, no, I don't think. Well, there's one you see like first thing in the game. There's one that you see. There's like the one that you always see. But I think my counter only says one bunny right now. Okay, so you have found one bunny. I think so. I'm going to check out with this. To be clear, the one you see, it doesn't count on your counter until you've caught it.

Correct. Got it. Okay. Then I think it's zero. Yeah. Okay. So I haven't caught a bunny. I don't even know what that means. Like how would I catch a bun. You use the net. Yeah, right? You pull out your net and stick in. in there. I know you're listening to me. Well, at the end, I mean, all these eggs and bunnies, at the end, you just have to prepare a feast. That's the real secret of animal. I mean, it's like an Easter thing. I mean, I don't even know.

I am so, most of I just want to see, yeah, what happens? Like, the true ending is going to be buck wild. Yeah, it's like, what is this all leading to? Is it leading to something? I'm very, yeah, I wonder if it's going to be a true ending. I guess we'll see because it does feel like, and I think there's some people who might be listening that this I may feel a little intimidated. Because it does feel to me like you can safely say you've completed the game once you found

all the eggs and gotten to that part. Yeah. And also it's not that's not that hard. I mean, maybe we should just say that since we're like getting to the end of this segment. Like the beginning is really not that hard. So if anything we've said seems intimidating, trust me, what Russ said about the on-ramp is really true. And I also took a really long time to get into Outer Wilds and I really back up what he was saying

before. It took me hours and I got motions like playing that game. This isn't like that at all. It's a 2D platforming game, so you're not going to get motion sick for one. And also, like, the initial puzzles are pretty simple. And then it builds and builds and builds. And it really just draws you in. And before you know it, at least in my case, I was just like, I already had a bunch of eggs before I even hit the credits.

And I was just, I was already enjoying hunting for eggs because to me, that reminds me of, like, you know, getting all the extras in a Metroid game, which I love doing anyway, because those are always just little environmental puzzles. So I was just like, oh, this is, this is just fun. And then by the time you're getting a bunch of bags, you're already really, you're halfway to sicko mode. Like, you're already kind of there. The game's already got you. Yeah. So just do it, you know? Just give it a try.

And then it'll get you. Fight the urge. Fight the urge to look stuff up. Honestly. Like you're going to hit a moment when you're like really banging your head against something. Just like go somewhere else. Yeah. And like maybe it's like a crossword puzzle.

You like walk away and come back to it. Just go do something else. Just go do something else for a while. that's nearly always what the solution would be for me because there would be something else to do somewhere else every time. So it's still fun. All right, we're going to take a break. Russ, we're going to say goodbye to you.

So Maddie and I will be back with one more thing. Russ, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you all. It was fun. And we will be spoiler-free in your wishes and your honor. Even after we say goodbye. That's right. All right, let's take a break.

Hello, teachers and faculty. this is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, the JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience.

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Why don't you go first? Sure. So I wanted to revisit this book, Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein, which I talked about weeks ago. And you might remember, Jason, you asked me weeks ago when I described the book because it's about Naomi Klein, often getting mistaken for conservative weirdo,

Naomi Wolf. And you asked me, well, did she ask Naomi Wolf for comment? Yeah. And she does. And I'm spoiling this for anybody who hasn't read the book. Because I think it's really weird.

The ending is her finally talking to Naomi. And I think it's really, well, she doesn't get to. But the final chapter, and I'm just going to spoil this because this is like something that we as reporters, or at least I know I found it really annoying for the entire book, because it's quite a long book that I was like, does this woman ever try to reach out to Naomi Wolf? Is she going to do it? That was like a weird thriller for me the whole time. So like this is the kind of spoiler that I feel like you would want. So like in the final chapter. Okay, so Russ would approve of this spoiler. Russ isn't here, okay?

So we don't have to bring him in on this. So in the final chapter, I did just promise him. You find out, not only has she reached out to Naomi Wolf multiple times and Naomi Wolf has declined to speak to her, which is sort of interesting, because then you're like, well, why? Because they've sort of interacted. And then you also find out this wild story of Naomi Klein having been a student journalist

at her college and having met Naomi Wolf at that time because Naomi Wolf was a couple years older and wrote a story about Naomi Wolf where she interviewed her. And that story is fascinating. So I won't spoil that. But that was just like wild. to have as the final chapter of the book. So I still recommend this book and also

Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. I just want to make sure I understand this. So the concept of this book is that she was exploring the concept of doppelgangers because she always gets mistaken for Naomi Well, but she doesn't mention until the end that she wrote a whole thing about Naomiville. Like isn't that one,

I would think that would be one of the reasons she's confused if like their names exist in the same place on the internet or something like that. But, I mean, that happened when she was a student. And the reasons why they're mistaken are manifold. The book has many chapters that explain the many reasons. And it's a pretty weird book in part because Naomi Klein is herself not a conservative

weirdo. And she kind of goes down the rabbit hole and is like, how do people become radicalized? What happens to them? What caused this to happen to Naomi Wolf who didn't seem to be conservative in her younger years? She wrote the beauty myth at one time. And what led to this person changing? So it's kind of like an unauthorized biography of Naomi Wolf, which makes it a very weird but also a pretty fascinating one.

But again, weird if you're a reporter who's like, did you talk to this woman? So that was something that was haunting me. And then I thought the ending was good, but I also had kind of mixed feelings about her putting it in that order. And so while I'm here, I just want to recommend. So Kirk and I both mentioned this bad books podcast,

if books could kill. And they do bonus episodes. And they did a bonus episode about this one. So I guess I'm saying you would have to pay for this if you want to listen to it. But they did like a clip of the bonus episode on their feed that you can listen to for, and get the goods, most of it.

And they talk about how this book in the context of, we finally read a good book. Like, that's kind of how they introduce it. So they're not saying they think Doppler is a bad book. But I was really appreciative that Michael Hobbs, who's one of the co-host, said that he also thought it was really strange, that she kind of wrote the book out of order. And he reconstructs the book in order as part of his review,

which I just thought was great. So I not only recommend the book, Daupylganger, I also really loved this bonus episode where Michael Hobbs kind of goes through the book in chronological order and is like, here's what the full timeline is of this weird relationship between these two women. And just, I don't know, those are my thoughts on doppelganger all around. I really recommend it still, even though it's a very odd book about Naomi Klein kind of losing her mind a little bit and being very self-effacing about it and self-deprecatory in a sweet way about the fact that she kind of lost her mind over this. situation. And then also just hearing Michael Hobbs get into it on if books could kill was a really great episode on the book. And he has a couple like minor critiques of the book that I agreed with too. So that's that's my one more thing. I feel like Kirk now kind of combining multiple things and

one more thing. But whatever, he's not here. No, that was all relevant. Kirk has much looser, more tenuous connections. Yeah, Kirk would be like, that reminds me of a horror movie I watched recently. And now I'm talking about that. I'm not doing that. So it's your turn now. It makes for sense. knowing, I just looked it up, it makes more sense knowing that Naomi Klein isn't actually a reporter, but more of kind of like an essayist, author, activist, like, SAS type. So that makes sense. Yeah. So she might not know how much that sort of thing annoys a reporter reading a book. She might just be unaware. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also the rules for writing books, I think for reporters are a little bit different than what you would see. Yeah, you can do whatever order you want,

I suppose, but. Well, you can, you can just kind of, you can be a little looser with, stuff in books. I mean, when I say you can. I mean, I actually, I don't like it. I mean, I mean, I would think you would have many opinions about it. Yeah, I've railed against recreated dialogue constantly like in these books. Well, she doesn't do that.

But it is, it is, it is an unusual structure. Like she does kind of tell this woman's life story out of order. So you have to kind of be willing to go with that when reading it. My one more thing. So usually before I talk. about a video game I like to spend a decent amount of time with it, but my one more thing was a game I haven't actually played too much, but still wanted to talk about. It's called mini shoot adventures. So this is a game. It's an indie game. It has gotten a little bit of buzz

and some pretty good review scores because it's really charming and looks good. And it's kind of this, it's best described as kind of a twin stick shooter version of Zelda. It's like a homage to Zelda games. You got your hearts. You got your keys. You got your dungeons and your abilities. that you get. Yeah, yeah, it's classic stuff. But instead of just kind of slashing and hacking enemies, you are using your two joysticks and maneuvering around this kind of spaceship and holding one, holding the right joystick to fire and holding the left joystick to move. And a lot of people are into this. And all power to them, but I bounced off of this game hard. And the main reason for that is because shooting for me personally speaking very personally shooting in a twin stick shooter is so much less

tactically satisfying than slashing something with your sword or like kind of any sort of traditional i don't know two-d gameplay Zelda gameplay or Metroidvania gameplay and so i went into this fully expecting to really enjoy it because i really enjoy these types of Zelda-like games and i just found that like oh my god i'm just kind of like sitting here what my guy is like just dodging bullets and holding the right stick like to the left or diagonally or something. And it's just not fun to play. And I just totally bounced off of it, which I thought was unfortunate because I think a lot

of people like this game and a lot of people will like this game, but it just was not for me. Your reason makes sense though. I get it. I mean, I really like a twin stick shooter, but I understand exactly what you mean. There's nothing like hitting something with a sword in a game. It just doesn't have the same feeling. Yeah, you kind of, I wanted that.

And yeah, I don't know. It's cool that there's something unique, that they're trying something new. And I know no shade to anyone who likes it, but I just bounced off of it hard, unfortunately. So I'll be going back to a different kind of projectile Dodger, which is Hades, too. At least for a bit. I'm probably going to stop and wait for, I'll wait for 1.0 at some point. But at least for now, I'll be checking that out. All right.

Maddie, it was Yeah, I can't say, I'm so used to saying. Kirk, Maddie, it is time to say goodbye. Maddie, Ghost of Rust, it is time to say goodbye. And we will see everybody soon. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music.

Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration, you can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at Triple ClickPod. Send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows.

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