It’s a clever concept, for sure, but things aren’t really explained too well early on. And there are some rooms where you’ll really want to do this: this reviewer is willing to bet that they will be the timed rooms, which require you to nail consecutive perfect shots in a multitude of directions in order to hit one narrow object, then the next, then the next, with each only appearing for a miniscule number of seconds after being activated by perfectly hitting the previous target at least twice.
There are more points on offer in each room than is necessary in order to get the door open, which comes in handy as it allows you to simply run to the door in the more challenging rooms in order to bypass them. There are some big and colourful characters in the small town outside the dungeon. You can rack up points, a la regular pinball, by hitting them (though they will sink into the ground and not be able to be hit any more after a certain point), and amassing a certain amount of points will allow you to open the door to the next room. But each of the sentient bumpers act as the meat and potatoes of the game’s progression. You need to hit all the bumper targets in order to build up the points needed to unlock the door to the next room.īumper-like objects make for the standard enemies of the game while stationary, hitting them can inject them with the energy to fire back a dangerous orb signified by a red trail of light. X handles the simple striking of the orbs, while Y can be used to charge, collecting multiple orbs to deal out more powerful strikes which amass more points than your standard shots. There’s a decent range of swords and household objects which can be used as your ‘flippers’, per se, and there’s also changes to your character’s outfit littered across the dungeons and the landscape. Set in caves within a remote desert settlement, the game’s format operates through swinging your sword-like objects at orbs which act as pinballs, cannoning off everything in their path until they run out of juice.
In fact, there are at least three genres at play here, with Flight School Studio producing a hack ‘n’ slash dungeon crawler meshed with pinball, of all things. If it sounds easy, then that's a failure of description, as you soon realize that catching the balls back in the middle yourself can push you back off the button, making a triumph of timing into a long sigh and a loop back to the beginning.Creature in the Well represents one of the more unexpected clashes of different genres that we’ve seen on the Switch eShop. The player has to wait for them to get close to matching up, flip a switch to put the balls inside of two brackets to bounce between and eventually eliminate, while also firing on a third wall repeatedly in the middle while not moving from the position that depresses the button keeping the walls up. In one example, two turrets were firing balls at asynchronous rates.
Puzzles in the game take the pinball concept about as far as it can go, using switches and levers and timing to balance both solving skills and execution. The game plays with those mechanics in interesting and often novel ways, in a way that feels like how level creators in Super Mario Maker create fascinating new ideas within a limited toolset. It feels reductive to say that Creature in the Well's mechanics are just a combination of pinball and action, but it's definitely not insulting to be that reductive.
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