Creature in the Well (Xbox One)

While pinball mechanics are simple and enjoyable on their own, games like Yoku’s Island Express show the interesting potential they have when mixed with the core elements of other video game genres. Creature in the Well was immediately on my radar once I learned it was aiming to mix together the hack-and-slash action of a dungeon crawler with the structure of pinball, but the game goes about it in a somewhat unexpected way.

 

The balls you’ll be hitting around in Creature in the Well are all part of a power mechanic that ties to the game’s plot. Playing as a worker robot who emerged from the sand in a desolated world, your goal is to plunge into the depths of a weather machine and reactivate it to give the world life again. However, the very creature responsible for the sorry state of the world lurks below, the monster that lends the game its title hoping to keep the few remaining people too afraid to undo the desertification. A few of the people are inspired to help the robot in its journey, but most of your interactions will be with the angry creature in the well, a being you only see as a pair of enormous eyes whose gnarled hands reach out whenever it wishes to speak with you. Visually the game is quite lovely, many areas within the machine having their own color pallet that has a comic book like mix of bold coloration, hatching, and sprinkles of grit and dirt, but the lack of outlines for objects gives it a look more its own. Important objects are properly contrasted with the environment as well, your bright white pinball stand-ins rarely hard to keep track of even at high speeds thanks to the smart color mixing.

However, the orbs of energy you are battering around are not just simple pinballs. Each orb carries a certain amount of energy inherently, this both feeding into the power you are accumulating over the course of the game to open doors and buy upgrades as well as determining the damage it will deal to the bumpers you need to overload in each room. The robot you play wields two different weapons, one used to hold the orbs in place to build up their power with repeated strikes and the other used to launch them out into the play area. The nature of these weapons can change as you find new replacements, with some special skills added to them like splitting your shot, slowing down time while you wind up a swing, or healing you when you hit an enemy pellet. Unlike most pinball games, Creature in the Well does not penalize you for losing your orb, and there’s no real spot in a room where a ball can be lost permanently. Instead, the failure state is having your character take too much damage, the opportunities to heal mostly being the rare pools of white liquid it can soak in. The scarcity of health does make the player play carefully, but there often isn’t much to worry about. Rooms will produce new orbs for you to hit if you let them dissipate, the guns and beam blasters that shoot dangerous shots at you can be won to your side or quickly dispatched if you nail them with an electrified pellet, and the few things that are dangerous like the bumpers that shoot out rings of damaging energy are usually only activated if you get careless. However, there are still enough moments where things come together to make certain moments of the game difficult, especially in the many boss battles with the creature where the arenas are designed to be hectic dodge fests as your own balls and the bosses shots fill the battle space.

 

In most rooms of Creature in the Well though, there is little to no resistance. You are presented with a bunch of bumpers in an arrangement you can usually freely walk around, the goal being to hit them enough times with the power orbs to generate energy and make the bumpers retract into the ground. Some rooms will have timers on how quickly you need to do this before they reset, other rooms only exist to rack up energy with no real challenge to the affair, and some only need to be completed if you want to open the secret paths to new weapons. Since the majority of the game takes place in these rooms where you’re just powering up a ball and firing it into bumpers with little concern though, things can get repetitive quite quickly. Creature in the Well is only a few hours long, and a lot of it is spent in rooms where you’re just hitting everything to build up energy. There are a decent amount of rooms with timed bumpers where it is essentially a puzzle to angle your shots right or ones where there are a few dangerous obstacles, but it feels like much more of your time is spent building up the power in a shot, letting it fly to hit a bunch of bumpers, charging it up again, and continuing that pattern to progress. Near the end of the game though things will suddenly demand a lot of quick, expert movement that isn’t really trained in the player, the dash manuever suddenly getting tested by boss battles where there is very little safe space and very little time to angle shots properly.

It doesn’t feel like Creature in the Well ever finds a precise moment where everything gels perfectly. Some puzzle rooms ask for quick action and smart angling, some battles provide the proper level of difficulty to stay engaging, but there are some moments where it tips towards monotony or rough difficulty instead. Coupled with a few quirks like inconsistent bounce angles and odd cases of enemy fire that can pass through walls into other rooms to hit you and Creature in the Well could lose some players pretty easily, but these flaws are less common than the basic hack-and-slash pinball play. There is an interesting caveat to the presence of some of the less enjoyable rooms though. Many rooms in Creature in the Well are functionally optional. There are definitely required ones like the boss battles, but so long as you have the electricity built up in reserve, you can open doors forward and keep moving even if a puzzle isn’t to your liking, a room seems monotonous, or if you don’t want to risk dying to a difficult arrangement. Inevitably you will have to build up power in some rooms to pull this tactic off, but many rooms even renew their bumpers after you’ve put some distance between you and that location, and while grinding out power is much more monotonous than progressing naturally through somewhat similar rooms, there is some leeway in Creature in the Well to push past its less interesting areas by doing only the decent stuff.

THE VERDICT: An imperfect mashup of pinball and hack-and-slash, Creature in the Well’s focus on building up power and failure only coming from player death make for a game that often feels a little slow, similar, and often risk-free. There are room arrangements that better mix the quest for electricity with time puzzles and legitimate threats, and the boss fights with the Creature can get quite complex and demanding, but overall Creature in the Well uses its creativity for a striking art style instead of varying up its area designs enough to be any more than simply decent.

 

And so, I give Creature in the Well for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. Despite being a short experience, Creature in the Well struggles with the issue of wasted space. Many rooms are too similar in design, and even though that repeated design isn’t inherently bad, it fills time that would be better spent on stronger ideas. Some of the late game areas focus a lot more on moving through large areas with dangerous built-in pinball challenges and this design could have really invigorated the game if it was a more present feature, but Creature in the Well settles into designs focused on building up power through mediocre bumper bouncing. When the action does kick in, it can be a little clumsy, bit it does inject that bit of excitement that keeps Creature in the Well from getting totally dull, and the fact you can skip areas you don’t want to tackle sometimes helps to alleviate a tiny bit of the repetition. The huge focus on power generation is definitely what keeps Creature in the Well from being something better though, too many rooms designed around that instead of providing meaningful challenges. You will undoubtedly encounter many proper fights and puzzles, but they are breaks from the rooms where you just bounce a pellet around for a bit to build up the energy for the next door.

 

Hack-and-slash games do sometimes have a routine they slip into where the unique challenges gradually shift into repetitious design that is still mildly satisfying despite not being all that mentally stimulating. Unfortunately, Creature in the Well carries that aspect over into its genre mashup, but that also means its achieves that baseline satisfaction while also mixing in the pinball elements so it doesn’t feel like any of its hack-and-slash brethren.  Ultimately though it’s a concept that wasn’t exactly well-realized but one that still has enough small ideas and moments that it doesn’t fully disappoint.