Animal Well: Seven Years, One Developer and a Game Under 40 MB
Billy Basso wrote his own engine from scratch and spent seven years hiding secrets inside a pixel-art well. Players cracked puzzles he thought would last years in a month. The story of indie gaming's most mysterious Metroidvania.
Most modern games are measured in tens of gigabytes. Animal Well, one of the most acclaimed games of 2024, weighs in at under 40 MB on Windows, smaller than many phone photos. That tiny file holds a sprawling, dark, beautiful world, and secrets so deep that its own creator expected them to take years to uncover.
Animal Well is the work of Billy Basso, who built it largely alone over about seven years, starting in 2017. It launched on 9 May 2024 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, reached Xbox Series X|S that October, and by August 2024 had sold around 650,000 copies, according to Basso.
A solo project, from the engine up
Before Animal Well, Basso worked on multiplayer and free-to-play mobile games at studios including Phosphor Games and NetherRealm Studios. His own game was the opposite of that world: small, quiet and uncompromising. It was his first solo project.
He wrote the entire thing in C++ without an existing engine, because he wanted to understand and control every system. Its look grew from walks around Chicago and his own artwork: a dark world of soft glows, flickering candles and enormous, unsettling animals.
A well full of layers
On the surface, Animal Well is a 2D Metroidvania: a connected map of flip-screen rooms on a 16-by-16 grid that you explore, unlocking tools that open new paths. You play a small creature, and instead of weapons you find odd items that double as puzzle tools.
That is only the first layer. Beneath it sits a second layer of deeper secret-hunting, and beneath that a third built around hidden bunnies and alternate-reality-game puzzles that reach outside the game itself. One puzzle required partial solutions from at least fifty players, meaning no single person could finish it alone.
From a dunkey video to a new publisher
Basso was joined in early 2021 by Dan Adelman, who handled marketing and business, forming the label Shared Memory. Then came the break. A showing at Day of the Devs in 2022, and a YouTube video by Jason Gastrow, better known as videogamedunkey, led to a partnership with Bigmode, the publisher Gastrow had founded with his wife, Leah. Animal Well became Bigmode's very first game.
Reviews were glowing. Animal Well holds a Metacritic score of 90 on PC and Switch, and 98% of critics on OpenCritic recommend it. It won Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction at the D.I.C.E. Awards and was nominated for Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game at The Game Awards 2024, as well as at the BAFTAs and the Game Developers Choice Awards.
Why it matters
Animal Well is a case for patience. In an era of early access and live updates, Basso spent seven years polishing a finished thing, then let the community discover how deep it went. The game trusts players to be curious, and players repaid that trust by organising, sharing notes and solving puzzles together. In our view it is one of the purest examples of a solo developer making exactly the game he wanted. It also proves that a small team can still build a community event out of nothing more than a well-hidden secret and a little faith in its players.
Where to play
Animal Well is on PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch. Go in blind, keep a notebook, and resist the wiki for as long as you can. For another solo-developer story built on patience, read our feature on Stardew Valley (here).