As children we were all told stories to entertain us or help us drift off to sleep, and for many these will have been fairy tales. These classic stories taught us valuable lessons about right and wrong, and were likely adapted to be suitable for our young minds. Fairy tales have a darker side though, with many of these classic stories featuring horrific monsters and terrifying elements in their original form. The darker side of this medium is perfect for a video game, twisting a comforting setting into something a little edgier. Well Dweller utilises its fairy tale setting perfectly, and is another sensational game from the developer that brought us Islets and Crypt Custodian.
In Well Dweller you play as one of the last birds left alive, and live with your family in a well. It’s not safe to leave this hole in the ground, because the queen of the land has ordered that all birds must be killed for their fashionable feathers. One day though you’re low on food, and your exhausted mother sends you and your siblings on a quest to steal some from the hunter. This goes better than expected until you set back off to home, and notice something suspicious in the background. The hunter follows you home and captures your family, leaving you alone with a rescue mission to plan. It’s a pretty dramatic introduction that is more impactful than I was expecting, and I hadn’t seen nothing yet.
The world of Well Dweller has more than just a couple of storybook baddies to avoid, it has multiple biomes full of different tales to tell. The sewers are full of memorials to lost frog children who were abducted in the night, whereas the nearby village is obsessed with witch trials. For a game that doesn’t force story down your throat, Well Dweller is full of charm and horror in equal measure.
While the world and stories of Well Dweller are engaging, it’s the classic Metroidvania antics that’ll keep you coming back for more. Your bird protagonist Glimmer starts off rather lacking in skills, with only a basic jump to get around and a matchstick for a weapon. New skills come thick and fast though, and they’re much more creative than I was anticipating.
Your first traversal skill allows you to fire your match into a surface, which you can bounce on to propel your bird body to new heights. It leaves you without a weapon to attack with though, which will often be an issue. Progressing through the adventure you’ll learn how to climb and glide to get around, and before you know it paths once impossible to traverse will be easy to access. It’s that classic loop we know and love, but it’s polished to perfection with so many different paths to explore and upgrades to obtain.
Easily as wonderful as the exploration though is the combat, which gets intense pretty quickly. As well as swinging your match, you can slide to avoid all damage coming your way which is incredibly satisfying. Different battle upgrades come just as quickly as the traversal ones too, with a healing salve that requires perfect timing to ingest and a flaming bottle you can throw at enemies. When faced with arena battles or massive boss fights the action is frantic and testing, and Well Dweller is just as entertaining as any of its peers in this department.
To improve your battle prowess even further you can equip trinkets, which have a variety of effects. You’ll need trinket points to do this though, which you’ll find by exploring the world or at the shop in your tent. At first I thought the buffs granted by trinkets were a bit naff, with small power upgrades that activated occasionally and never really felt impactful. It turns out this was all part of the plan though, as trinkets can be upgraded to make them way more impressive. Gathering currency and collectibles feels especially worth it when you’ve got eight powered up trinkets making your life easier, and that makes that exploration all the more rewarding.
Almost everything about Well Dweller blew me away, from the action, to the visuals, and even that beautiful soundtrack. It’s the little things that kept me engaged from start to finish, and which make this game truly special. Things like the time trial challenges that test your movement prowess to the max, or how easy it is to mark your map so you remember where out of reach secrets are sat. Fast travel unlocks early, and can be activated from any location for easy map navigation. There’s even the ability to pay for a marker to your next destination or to indicate any secrets you’ve missed, meaning you absolutely can’t get stuck. Kyle Thompson really thought of everything here, and I’m incredibly grateful he did.
There aren’t really many issues with Well Dweller, but if I had a gun to my head I could probably manage to think of a couple. One of these is the difficulty, which is a little all over the place. Early on I was presented the perfect amount of challenge to keep me engaged, but as I progressed I found myself beating multiple bosses too easily without having to learn attack patterns and tells. The best of boss fights take multiple attempts and feel so damn rewarding to overcome, so I felt a little let down whenever I battered one to a pulp before it showed me all its moves.
Well Dweller is a Metroidvania with so much polish, charm and wonderful exploration, and I’d recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in the genre. With fairy tale vibes and combat that never gets old, I devoured this game and never wanted it to end. In a year where the sheer number of games is overwhelming and time is precious, Well Dweller is worth every last second.
