Designed primarily by just two members of Flight School Studio,
Creature in the Well explores the idea of using pinball-inspired mechanics
to work your way through a series of dungeons.
While it’s not without its flaws, the concept feels fresh
and it’s bolstered by interesting upgrades and striking art direction.
You play as a robot that suddenly wakes up during a sandstorm,
soon finding your way into a cave full of dormant machines
that you were designed to help maintain long ago.
Within minutes, you come face to face with the enigmatic creature living in the mountain’s passages,
and it wastes no time letting you know that you aren’t welcome here.
The story is somewhat sparse, consisting of messages on terminals,
conversations with a handful of characters, and confrontations with the creature itself,
but the short scraps of lore you do come across feel worth reading,
uncovering the history and purpose of this massive facility.
Working your way through the machine’s depths involves interacting with room after room of devices
that function like pinball bumpers.
Hitting these bumpers with orbs of energy charges them with more and more power,
and once a bumper is fully charged, it recedes back into the machine.
As more bumpers get powered up, stored energy can be used to unlock doors leading further in.
Each room has different arrangements of bumpers,
often requiring you to carefully angle your shots and ricochet balls off corners.
Some rooms serve as puzzles, requiring you to hit a series of bumpers in quick succession.
If you miss one shot, the system resets, and you have to give the sequence another go.
If you had to do all this simply by whacking the balls back and forth, it would become quite tedious, but
in addition to the weapon you use to strike the ball, you have a secondary weapon
that holds the ball in front of you and allows you to aim more precisely.
By doing this, you can actually grab on to multiple balls at a time
and charge them with additional energy before firing,
making them far more effective at transferring power with each hit.
You start off with a simple pipe to smack the ball and a katana to charge it,
but as you explore, you uncover a range of alternate weapons.
Some of these are cosmetic like the frying pan and wooden spoon
hanging in the nearby village, but others have additional attributes that are quite valuable.
A fan blade lets you absorb energy from orange projectiles to heal.
A hammer briefly slows down time as you strike,
and a set of dual blades projects a laser in front of you, providing more guidance to aim at faraway objects.
The rooms aren’t always safe, either.
It doesn’t take long before you encounter devices that can damage your bot if you’re not careful –
cannons, wide beams, and swarms of drones require you to react quickly,
either batting back shots or moving out of the way.
These traps introduce bullet-hell-like elements to the game,
and staying out of harm’s way while trying to aim your shots
requires you to hone a fairly demanding set of skills.
Unfortunately, the robot’s dash ability is sluggish and doesn’t cover much distance,
at times making it feel like you just aren’t quick enough
to properly dodge certain attacks.
Each section of the facility ends by confronting the creature itself,
but unlike a typical boss fight, you don’t battle it directly.
Instead, you have to survive through several rooms packed with the creature’s dangerous weapons.
Most of these boss sequences are challenging enough to take a few attempts, but
one later on feels significantly tougher than the rest.
While later sections do add new mechanics,
the biggest thing holding back Creature in the Well is simply that
the overall dungeon structure is somewhat repetitive.
Each area consists of two not-so-hidden secret rooms, similar boss fights,
and an ending room with four terminals dispensing lore
and a station to turn on one of the machine’s key systems.
Even with the fantastic comic-inspired art style, much of the game looks essentially the same,
focusing on stone walls and steel structures from beginning to end.
The clever reuse of assets is essential for such a small team, but
it would definitely help if both the environments and the structure branched out more.
Additionally, the town doesn’t evolve much beyond a couple doors that eventually open,
and the shopkeeper’s services are limited to restoring old bot cores to expand your energy.
However, the game is short enough to weather this repetition without feeling overly tedious.
Depending on your skill level, you can clear it in about 5 to 6 hours,
or perhaps a bit more depending on your obsession with secrets.
It should also be mentioned that the game boasts some great sound design.
Part of the joy of each new weapon is just hearing the smack of the ball
when you hit it with a baseball bat or a frying pan.
Each new weapon sounds unique, adding to the fun and feedback of the game’s most basic mechanics.
The droning electronic music is also fitting for the game’s dusty metallic hallways.
Unfortunately, the Xbox One X version currently has a bug
that prevents any audio from playing during the game’s opening and ending cut-scenes.
It should be fixed in the next patch, but it’s a bummer for anyone who completes the game until then.
While more variety and polish would be appreciated,
that doesn’t stop Creature in the Well from being enjoyable throughout.
It feels great to grab a bullet out of the air, charge it up, and slam it back in the other direction,
and getting a ball to ricochet through a narrow gap is always satisfying.
Gorgeous visuals certainly help,
but it’s the gameplay’s intrinsic rhythm
and the sense that there’s always room to improve that serves as a solid hook through to the end.
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