About halfway animal pit, I felt like I had been lied to. I read all the shine opinions of the game and heard the breathless praise on social media. But my expectations didn't match my reality… until I beat the game. Now, I'm on my way to 100 percent completion of a game I was seriously considering abandoning.
Spoilers for animal pit They are below.
Although I loved animal pitThe new take on traditional movement abilities (the tools it provides have multiple clever uses) and the platforming itself was often demoralizing. Initially, animal pitIt seemed like the platform had too large and frequent difficulty spikes. She could often see where she needed to go and how to get there (she often looked up video guides to confirm that she was doing it right with the right tools), but actually executing it was more work than fun and engaging.
Although I loved animal pitA fresh take on traditional movement skills, the platforming itself was often demoralizing.
I've always thought that the difficulty of a task in a platform game should be proportional to its importance: the hardest moments should be reserved for secrets and optional objectives, while everything involved in completing the game should be more achievable. That way, I'm still in control of my experience and, more importantly, I'm still having an experience. If discovering a secret is harder than I would like, then I can choose not to continue and complete the game with one completion percentage point less. But if simply getting from point A to point B is too difficult, opting out means abandoning the game altogether. animal pitThe platforms convinced me that I had hit an obstacle so frustratingly difficult that I would abandon it and never return.
Fortunately, that didn't happen. Somehow, I persisted long enough to collect all four animal llamas to complete the first “ending” of the game, thinking I would stop there. But then, right before the final encounter, I found a room full of skulls that contained an upgrade for the bubble wand. Remember this, it will be important in a moment.
The bubble wand creates small platforms of bubbles that you can jump on, but you can only blow one at a time. Upgraded bubble wand allows you to blow multiple Bubbles that, with the right technique, will allow you to overcome many of the game's obstacles.
Do you remember the skulls? I discovered that all the skulls in that room, piled high enough to reach the wand, represented the number of times I died. Realizing that, I was surprised that even though it wasn't initially vibing with the game, it was always vibing with me. The bubble wand upgrade is unattainable unless you have accumulated enough skulls to build a platform to it. The only way I got what finally made this game click for me was thanks to all the frustration it put me through in the first place.
When I realized that, I started laughing maniacally, with tears in my eyes, thinking, “Oh, you cheeky bastards!” I immediately went back to the beginning of the game to hunt for eggs, something I had already decided I wasn't going to do. But now he was locked up. Understood. Now I'm trapped in the (animal) pit and I'll never get out.
