What does it mean for a game to "respect the player's time"?
In some cases, this is easy to answer. Games that are full of busywork, whether it's in the form of high volumes of mandatory side quests or mobile game cooldown meters, want the player to stay with the game well past the point of reasonable time investment. Games like Red Dead Redemption II, with huge amounts of slow manual travel both in and out of quests, refuse the player convenience. (Whether RDR2 uses this to good effect is up to taste.) Where it gets more interesting is when a game commits a litany of minor sins which add up - inconvenient menuing, convoluted town layouts, long animations, a gameplay loop that creates frequent trips back to the shop - and causes an otherwise solid game to be bloated and run longer than necessary. Usually, however, these elements are discussed in the context of longer games where they can add up to many additional hours. What does it look like when a game doesn't respect your time but doesn't ask for much of it in the first place?
On a completely unrelated note, this is a review of Creature in the Well, an indie game from 2019 developed by multimedia studio Flight School, This playthrough was conducted on the Switch version via digital download, YMMV for other platforms or formats.
Creature in the Well takes place in a desert village called Mirage which exists within the eye of a sandstorm. The town's inhabitants have long been cut off from the rest of the world by these unending winds, stranded alone on this earth, only them and their gargantuan mechanized mountain of murky origin and purpose. You play as a "BOT-C" who was once an engineer on the machine who's now reawakened and ventured inside to fight off the mysterious creature and finish what was started. I'm going to tell you up front that I simply did not care about this game's story. I think it's pretty by-the-numbers and I struggled to buy in, but I was so disengaged that I don't even really want to give a negative impression since I didn't make much of an effort. Pretty much everything you get is through occasional one-sided conversations and reading old computer logs, and if that's your thing and you like the setting it's probably passable. (There's one exception we'll touch on a little later.)
Flight School describes CitW as "pinball with swords," which is a nice elevator pitch but not a great explanation. It's played in a top-down perspective similar to Hades as you travel through dungeons. Each room is going to have its own obstacles and challenges and such, and there will be ball spawners present. With the Y button, you can catch and charge up to three balls, increasing their power level, and with the X button you can swing your bat and punt them in the direction you're facing. Almost all obstacles in CitW will have a visible meter on them that fills up as they're hit, and once you've imparted enough power onto them they'll deactivate - it's a mix of pinball and block breaker elements. When balls connect with objects, you earn energy based on how much the ball was charged, and this acts as your currency for exactly two things: buying upgrades (and there's only one single linear upgrade option) and opening doors to proceed further into the dungeon. Clear all the objects in rooms with a pinball bumper thing sunk into the floor and it'll raise up and give you a bunch of energy as a reward.
An example of what normal play looks like later in the game.
The first quirk to note here is how the game's treatment of energy makes the sense of progression a little wonky. From what I could tell, you're not actually required to clear rooms to proceed, you can always just go through the next door as long as you can spend enough energy to do so. A lot of side paths in the dungeons are only to give you more energy, with the reward at the end just being a big room full of passive objects to score off of. In some games it's normal to receive cash as a prize, but the weird thing about CitW's energy is that it's limitless. Rooms reset if you leave the dungeon or wait long enough, so you can grind for energy in a lot of places. (Note: I witnessed this room reset behaviour in hostile rooms, but I didn't test its frequency in passive reward rooms.) This makes these rewards feel kind of hollow, even if they're ultimately necessary to stay on pace for max upgrades by the end of the game and make the bosses more manageable.
Most obstacles in the game are standard passive barriers which you damage for energy, but you'll also encounter fireball-shooting cannons, explosive towers, mob spawners, and such that put you under pressure. There are also optional timed challenges where you'll have to break a series of objects, each within a few seconds, in order to open up secret paths. These are where you'll find new items: cores, which are consumed to buy upgrades; banners, which are cosmetic capes you can wear; and charge and strike items which change your attack properties. Some of these weapons will have really useful abilities like healing you or giving you a laser sight, but others appear to have no unique functions - or if they do, they're sufficiently cryptic that I couldn't figure them out.
As a fan of this game's influences, my first and probably most fundamental complaint about Creature in the Well is a limitation in its gameplay. There doesn't appear to be a limit on the number of balls that can be on screen, at least not one that I noticed, but you're only ever allowed to hold and charge three at a time. Any additional balls that enter your range while you're charging will disappear. I understand that arbitrarily high volumes of balls would likely break the game, but I have the same disappointment here that I do with some modern block breaker games. Multiball play is one of the best parts of both Breakout and pinball, and not getting to ramp up the numbers even in the late game is a shame. Now, this limitation only applies to individual instances of charging - you could catch a few balls, charge them up, release them, and then go grab some more balls that have spawned or been fired by enemies and charge those ones up too. And indeed, you'll do this, sometimes inadvertantly, but I found that because the game is balanced around shooting highly charged balls, you're usually better off powering up a set of three, sniping something with them, and repeating. Any extra balls in play are gravy.
Numbers go up.
Like I said at the top, CitW is a short game. It consists of eight dungeons, plus a small hub area that serves very little purpose. Each of these dungeons is maybe half an hour long, and while the game promises unique themes and challenges in each of them, they end up feeling fairly similar. Each one will introduce a new idea, such as moving platforms or a new enemy type, but they mix in a lot of standard stuff along the way and the optional challenges sometimes use entirely different skills rather than having you master those introduced in that dungeon. The boss fight at the end of each area will have some relation to the central theme but even that's sometimes tenuous. Boss battles are a series of several rooms in a row where you have to dodge more enemies than usual and break all the things, and usually the boss will start resetting blocks if you don't clear things fast enough. None of these fights were exceedingly difficult but I did find myself wondering how I would have done a couple of them if I hadn't been exploring for extra gear. As it stood, I played Creature in the Well as a completionist, 100%ing every dungeon and finishing the game in just under five hours.
And in those five hours, there was a lot of downtime because Creature in the Well is severely lacking in consideration for the player. Suppose you get stuck on a particular room, such as I did with a side path in the North Star Conduit. You attempt the room, you die, and you respawn outside of the mountain in the town. You have to walk all the way back from the edge of town up into the level hub inside the mountain. You have to go to the healing pool and stand in it and wait because dying doesn't refill your health bar. Then you have to go back up into the level entrance and traverse the dungeon to get back to where you were. There's no real incentive to replay rooms you've completed on a previous visit, so you'll mostly be running through them trying not to get hit on your way to your real destination. The farther into a dungeon you get stuck, the longer this will take, and it's made worse by the sloppy implementation of running itself. Run is bound to the same button as dash, and in fact you can only run after having dashed; holding down the run button during a screen transition or while getting hit or even repressing it in the middle of a dash animation won't cut it. Running isn't even that much faster than walking and there's very little feedback to tell you which you're doing, so travel quickly becomes a chore. It almost feels like it's borrowing the format of roguelite action games where the post-death walk is your chance to breathe and tweak your build, but there's absolutely nothing to do here except go buy an upgrade if you have a core to spare.
There's also a lot of repetition. While the key challenges are unique, there are a lot of rooms that are cloned from place to place. This isn't a big deal for stuff like transitional hallways - though I do think those are a little too frequent and long - but you're going to run into a lot of minor rooms that are similar if not identical, again usually with no reason to spend time on them except to accumulate energy. And the gameplay itself becomes pretty hollow and repetitive once you get a feel for the rhythm of catch-and-release combat. Pinball is a game about reaction time, conservation of balls, predicting the physics of obstacles. If we take CitW instead to have block breaker DNA akin to Breakout (or more specifically the microgenre of Breakout-meets-tennis action games such as Sanrio World Smash Ball), those games heavily involve positioning and adapting to a changing board as objects go away. Creature in the Well doesn't play badly, but it feels rather inconsequential most of the time because the balls don't matter that much. Outside of a few specific cases, you never have to care much about what happens to them because more will always spawn, and their bounces off the walls and geometry are often completely unpredictable.
You're going to see a lot of small filler rooms like this.
Really, the nail in the coffin is the price. $15 for a five hour game is steep but acceptable when there's a profound story to tell or a lot of replay value. A game like Vanquish has a short campaign but a lot to offer. With Creature in the Well, you just don't get that much, especially when you consider what portion of that play time is empty or redundant. If you can get it on sale you don't have a lot to lose, but the console ports never get discounted so you'd best stick to Steam.
Recommended If You Like: watching balls bounce around; mysterious post-disaster storytelling (but don't need snappy gameplay to back it up); sand
In some cases, this is easy to answer. Games that are full of busywork, whether it's in the form of high volumes of mandatory side quests or mobile game cooldown meters, want the player to stay with the game well past the point of reasonable time investment. Games like Red Dead Redemption II, with huge amounts of slow manual travel both in and out of quests, refuse the player convenience. (Whether RDR2 uses this to good effect is up to taste.) Where it gets more interesting is when a game commits a litany of minor sins which add up - inconvenient menuing, convoluted town layouts, long animations, a gameplay loop that creates frequent trips back to the shop - and causes an otherwise solid game to be bloated and run longer than necessary. Usually, however, these elements are discussed in the context of longer games where they can add up to many additional hours. What does it look like when a game doesn't respect your time but doesn't ask for much of it in the first place?
On a completely unrelated note, this is a review of Creature in the Well, an indie game from 2019 developed by multimedia studio Flight School, This playthrough was conducted on the Switch version via digital download, YMMV for other platforms or formats.
Creature in the Well takes place in a desert village called Mirage which exists within the eye of a sandstorm. The town's inhabitants have long been cut off from the rest of the world by these unending winds, stranded alone on this earth, only them and their gargantuan mechanized mountain of murky origin and purpose. You play as a "BOT-C" who was once an engineer on the machine who's now reawakened and ventured inside to fight off the mysterious creature and finish what was started. I'm going to tell you up front that I simply did not care about this game's story. I think it's pretty by-the-numbers and I struggled to buy in, but I was so disengaged that I don't even really want to give a negative impression since I didn't make much of an effort. Pretty much everything you get is through occasional one-sided conversations and reading old computer logs, and if that's your thing and you like the setting it's probably passable. (There's one exception we'll touch on a little later.)
Flight School describes CitW as "pinball with swords," which is a nice elevator pitch but not a great explanation. It's played in a top-down perspective similar to Hades as you travel through dungeons. Each room is going to have its own obstacles and challenges and such, and there will be ball spawners present. With the Y button, you can catch and charge up to three balls, increasing their power level, and with the X button you can swing your bat and punt them in the direction you're facing. Almost all obstacles in CitW will have a visible meter on them that fills up as they're hit, and once you've imparted enough power onto them they'll deactivate - it's a mix of pinball and block breaker elements. When balls connect with objects, you earn energy based on how much the ball was charged, and this acts as your currency for exactly two things: buying upgrades (and there's only one single linear upgrade option) and opening doors to proceed further into the dungeon. Clear all the objects in rooms with a pinball bumper thing sunk into the floor and it'll raise up and give you a bunch of energy as a reward.
An example of what normal play looks like later in the game.
The first quirk to note here is how the game's treatment of energy makes the sense of progression a little wonky. From what I could tell, you're not actually required to clear rooms to proceed, you can always just go through the next door as long as you can spend enough energy to do so. A lot of side paths in the dungeons are only to give you more energy, with the reward at the end just being a big room full of passive objects to score off of. In some games it's normal to receive cash as a prize, but the weird thing about CitW's energy is that it's limitless. Rooms reset if you leave the dungeon or wait long enough, so you can grind for energy in a lot of places. (Note: I witnessed this room reset behaviour in hostile rooms, but I didn't test its frequency in passive reward rooms.) This makes these rewards feel kind of hollow, even if they're ultimately necessary to stay on pace for max upgrades by the end of the game and make the bosses more manageable.
Most obstacles in the game are standard passive barriers which you damage for energy, but you'll also encounter fireball-shooting cannons, explosive towers, mob spawners, and such that put you under pressure. There are also optional timed challenges where you'll have to break a series of objects, each within a few seconds, in order to open up secret paths. These are where you'll find new items: cores, which are consumed to buy upgrades; banners, which are cosmetic capes you can wear; and charge and strike items which change your attack properties. Some of these weapons will have really useful abilities like healing you or giving you a laser sight, but others appear to have no unique functions - or if they do, they're sufficiently cryptic that I couldn't figure them out.
As a fan of this game's influences, my first and probably most fundamental complaint about Creature in the Well is a limitation in its gameplay. There doesn't appear to be a limit on the number of balls that can be on screen, at least not one that I noticed, but you're only ever allowed to hold and charge three at a time. Any additional balls that enter your range while you're charging will disappear. I understand that arbitrarily high volumes of balls would likely break the game, but I have the same disappointment here that I do with some modern block breaker games. Multiball play is one of the best parts of both Breakout and pinball, and not getting to ramp up the numbers even in the late game is a shame. Now, this limitation only applies to individual instances of charging - you could catch a few balls, charge them up, release them, and then go grab some more balls that have spawned or been fired by enemies and charge those ones up too. And indeed, you'll do this, sometimes inadvertantly, but I found that because the game is balanced around shooting highly charged balls, you're usually better off powering up a set of three, sniping something with them, and repeating. Any extra balls in play are gravy.
Numbers go up.
Like I said at the top, CitW is a short game. It consists of eight dungeons, plus a small hub area that serves very little purpose. Each of these dungeons is maybe half an hour long, and while the game promises unique themes and challenges in each of them, they end up feeling fairly similar. Each one will introduce a new idea, such as moving platforms or a new enemy type, but they mix in a lot of standard stuff along the way and the optional challenges sometimes use entirely different skills rather than having you master those introduced in that dungeon. The boss fight at the end of each area will have some relation to the central theme but even that's sometimes tenuous. Boss battles are a series of several rooms in a row where you have to dodge more enemies than usual and break all the things, and usually the boss will start resetting blocks if you don't clear things fast enough. None of these fights were exceedingly difficult but I did find myself wondering how I would have done a couple of them if I hadn't been exploring for extra gear. As it stood, I played Creature in the Well as a completionist, 100%ing every dungeon and finishing the game in just under five hours.
And in those five hours, there was a lot of downtime because Creature in the Well is severely lacking in consideration for the player. Suppose you get stuck on a particular room, such as I did with a side path in the North Star Conduit. You attempt the room, you die, and you respawn outside of the mountain in the town. You have to walk all the way back from the edge of town up into the level hub inside the mountain. You have to go to the healing pool and stand in it and wait because dying doesn't refill your health bar. Then you have to go back up into the level entrance and traverse the dungeon to get back to where you were. There's no real incentive to replay rooms you've completed on a previous visit, so you'll mostly be running through them trying not to get hit on your way to your real destination. The farther into a dungeon you get stuck, the longer this will take, and it's made worse by the sloppy implementation of running itself. Run is bound to the same button as dash, and in fact you can only run after having dashed; holding down the run button during a screen transition or while getting hit or even repressing it in the middle of a dash animation won't cut it. Running isn't even that much faster than walking and there's very little feedback to tell you which you're doing, so travel quickly becomes a chore. It almost feels like it's borrowing the format of roguelite action games where the post-death walk is your chance to breathe and tweak your build, but there's absolutely nothing to do here except go buy an upgrade if you have a core to spare.
There's also a lot of repetition. While the key challenges are unique, there are a lot of rooms that are cloned from place to place. This isn't a big deal for stuff like transitional hallways - though I do think those are a little too frequent and long - but you're going to run into a lot of minor rooms that are similar if not identical, again usually with no reason to spend time on them except to accumulate energy. And the gameplay itself becomes pretty hollow and repetitive once you get a feel for the rhythm of catch-and-release combat. Pinball is a game about reaction time, conservation of balls, predicting the physics of obstacles. If we take CitW instead to have block breaker DNA akin to Breakout (or more specifically the microgenre of Breakout-meets-tennis action games such as Sanrio World Smash Ball), those games heavily involve positioning and adapting to a changing board as objects go away. Creature in the Well doesn't play badly, but it feels rather inconsequential most of the time because the balls don't matter that much. Outside of a few specific cases, you never have to care much about what happens to them because more will always spawn, and their bounces off the walls and geometry are often completely unpredictable.
You're going to see a lot of small filler rooms like this.
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Really, the nail in the coffin is the price. $15 for a five hour game is steep but acceptable when there's a profound story to tell or a lot of replay value. A game like Vanquish has a short campaign but a lot to offer. With Creature in the Well, you just don't get that much, especially when you consider what portion of that play time is empty or redundant. If you can get it on sale you don't have a lot to lose, but the console ports never get discounted so you'd best stick to Steam.
Recommended If You Like: watching balls bounce around; mysterious post-disaster storytelling (but don't need snappy gameplay to back it up); sand