There seem to be a lot of games coming out lately that are focused on lone (perhaps the last?) protagonists of a particular lineage fixing the mistakes of their predecessors. If I had to give Creature in the Well any kind of descriptor, it’d be that, but with pinball.
Developed by Flight School Studios, Creature in the Well is a very pretty game that plays well, but doesn’t always communicate what it wants you to do. I get the sense that it’s a roguelite, with not quite the same random qualities as games like Dead Cells, but with a whole host of technically challenging puzzles that circulate randomly depending on your playthrough. At the very least, I expect that’s the feeling the studio wants you to feel.
Creature in the Well is certainly interesting enough for me to want to play more of it to see where the story goes; right now all I know is that there is a very big monster living in a mountain, guarding an inscrutable machine that I’m reactivating after many, many years of dormancy. Other than that, I’m basically clueless about where the game is going. There are vague themes of post-apocalyptica, climate disaster (one of the NPCs you can talk to mentions that they link the machine in the mountain with the weather), and isolation throughout, but I’m not sure yet where that’s going.
I’m not currently very good at the combat. It’s designed around your character, the Engineer, gathering and shooting pinballs at various power bumpers in various rooms. Some of the rooms’ puzzles are timed, some of them involve you shooting pinballs at various targets in a specific order, and some of them involve deflecting balls that “enemy” bumpers fire at you. All of this is still early combat though, and there’s always a chance I’ll git gud at some point.
So, bottom line, I’m having a reasonable amount of fun with Creature in the Well. Who knows if that’ll change?
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