Picture this: A lone robot wakes up in a windswept desert. Nothing but sand as far as its optics can see. How it got there? Unknown. Why a desert? Unknown. A short walk and it finds a small town, with no one around, a well at one end and an opening in a mountain at the other.
This is the premise of Creature In the Well, and it is a very effective one. The game combines atmospheric story telling, a quality art style and some interesting gameplay into a game ultimately let down by level design and imprecision.
The scene I set out above is the opening of the game, and you soon discover that the residents of the town have taken refuge from ‘The Creature’ a malevolent being living in the mountain. Your character goes inside to discover various parts of a machine and if they are all reactivated then the sandstorm cutting off the town outside will cease. The wrinkle is the titualur creature, for it doesn’t want you to turn the machine back on.
What proceeds is what would be a fairly standard hack and slash game except for two things: There are no enemies other than the creature, and pinball. Now, the pinball you might be thinking of isn’t quite what the game delivers. This being a hack and slash, your character picks up two sets of weapons, charge tools and strike tools. These range from drain pipes to swords and spiked whips and you use the charge tools to grab the energy balls floating around the environment or that are shot at you and the strike tools to blast them outwards.
Doing these actions solve environmental puzzles and gets you through the strange boss encounters, but you don’t actually attack enemies since there isn’t any. What you have to strike are pinball table bumpers that get charged up and eventually disappear, clear the room you’re in and a new path will open up. This could be a secret path or the way you need to go to move the game along. A secondary effect of charging these balls is you are provided with ‘power’ the in game currency.
This currency is used to open sealed doors as well as upgrade your character and activate nodes to teleport you closer to the boss encounters when you die. I say ‘die’ but you don’t really, you run out of health and the creature then rears up out of the shadows, snatches you and tosses your barely functional body out of the well. It’s a good way to handle it, and adds to the dark cartoon feel you get from the visuals and sound design.
Unfortunately, it's the pinball mechanics that ultimately let the game down. Starting out as an interesting and fun twist on the standard mechanics of the genre, especially when multiple energy balls are bouncing off lots of bumpers with a brilliantly satisfying sound effect, it quickly becomes an exercise in frustration. This is down to the inherently imprecise nature of pinball as well as what some of the rooms in levels ask you to do.
On more than one occasion, I would walk into a room and it seemed fairly obvious what to do, get the balls to hit two bumpers on the left and right. However, once I did this and they disappeared, five more smaller bumpers appear with a five second count down above them. I have to get the balls to power all five in under five seconds to progress. So I start slashing to catch and charge the one ball in the centre of the room plus the others randomly bouncing around the room, to a maximum of three. This can take way longer than the count down, especially as the balls will bounce in all directions when they hit the bumper, meaning you have to reset and try to capture and charge again and hit all five in the time limit.
The balls bouncing can help but not always, and all too often I felt it was more luck than any kind of skill that I got through a room as the balls flying about happened to hit the bumpers at the right time. It’s a level of required precision that that game cannot deliver on, and is compounded by extra obstacle in certain rooms, especially explosive towers.
These towers pop up in certain rooms and are either static or moving. When a charged ball hits them they explode with a large radius, damaging your character. Now you do have a dash move and can move around if you aren’t actively charging a set of balls, but this can prove very tricky to pull off, not to mention that the amount of on screen information can become difficult to keep track of, so you just don’t see when the towers are about to fire.
All that just occurs in the standard sections, things get even more hectic when you reach the boss rooms. Each level has one of these, and it involves a square platform in the middle of the room and various bumpers and hazards around the edge, clearing all the bumpers moves you onto the next stage of the fight, simple right? No, not as simple as you might think as the creature’s arms will rear up out of the darkness and launch damaging blasts at you. These are slow moving and can be destroyed by firing charged balls at them, but it is one extra thing to keep track of in a room that will combine every element you have encountered so far: explosive towers, timed bumpers, launchers and bumpers that fire beams of damaging energy. All that plus parts might be spinning or moving, blocked off or some other such wrinkle.
Now, it's not like these are impossible to complete, and they are certainly a challenge, but my previous comments about the imprecision just lead to anger inducing moments that detract from the overall quality of the game, because this isn’t one of those situations where you never feel like it’s your fault. For me, it was always the games fault because the ‘combat’ such as it is simply isn’t tight enough to make what you need to accomplish fun.
I do still recommend Creature in the Well though, because the attempt is what is important here. The developers took a tried and tested concept and put their own spin on it, attempting something that has rarely been tried before. Depending on your opinion, that attempt might have ultimately failed, but they took the chance, and everything else about the game is top notch. Gaming won’t change without those chances being taken, so support this game for what it gets right and wrong, because that is how things move forward, and if you have a game pass subscription, its free, so what have you got to lose?