How do you make genres like the indie favourites “hack-and-slash” and “dungeon crawler” more interesting? You add pinball, of course! And not for the first time has pinball been used to alter a tried-and-true formula: anyone remember Metroid Prime Pinball or Sonic Spinball? Even Yoku’s Island Express – what seemed to be yet another metroidvana – was transformed with the simplistic wonders of pinball. The take away message from this? Pinball makes everything better. When you see a trailer out for a brand new indie title that essentially says “it’s pinball with swords,” you just know it’s got to be good.
Released on September 6th 2019 on all the systems except for Playstation for once – this one’s for the Switch, Xbox One and Steam users – Flight School Studio’s Creature in the Well was introduced as a curious play on the top-down hack-and-slash, dungeon crawler genre that we’re oh so familiar with by introducing a pinball mechanic. Surprisingly enough, this feels organic and makes you wonder: why hasn’t this been done before? Seems so obvious! Of course pinball fits the motions of hack-and-slash gameplay! With its simplistic eye catching visual style, and unique gameplay, should Creature in the Well rank at the top of your favourite indie high score list, or is it a hit and a miss?
Waking up in the middle of a desert with little to no sense of direction, players take on the role as the last remaining BOT-C unit – a kind of engineering robot – as you journey further into the depths of a deserted mountain. Here you must restore power to a forgotten ancient facility, all the while being stalked and taunted by a mysterious Creature hidden in the dark crevices below: occasionally it comes out to taunt you with snarky remarks, or interrupt your journey with what might constitute as a “boss battle,” vanquishing you outside the mountain when you fall, like a cross between a Wallmaster and the toilet hand from Zelda. Sounds a little like an alternative take on The Hobbit, but rest assured, there are no dwarfs or dragons, or even hardcore Tolkien fans translating Elvish here.
For the most part, the story is fairly minimal, with more emphasis being placed – as you might imagine – on the gameplay. It is after all a dungeon crawling pinball game. Throughout your travels in the mountain, you’ll run into computer terminals with log entries from robot engineers of the past, telling anecdotal stories that can be pieced together to hint at what happened to the facility.
“Pinball with swords” certainly conjures a peculiar image, though it doesn’t adequately describe the intricate primary gameplay mechanic. As you venture further into the caverns of Moria, you’ll find that each room is conveniently laid out to mimic a pinball table motif, with various types of bumpers that light up, floating glowing orbs, and sometimes canons that shoot balls of fire that can be turned into pinballs. And just to push your reflexes that little further, there are also bumpers that set off deadly shockwaves when hit, so you’d best make sure you dodge out of the way of their incoming blast radius.
Thankfully the controls are relatively simple, with “B” acting as a dodge move, “Y” being used to catch and charge pinballs, “X” acts as your strike, while “A” simply interacts with characters and consoles. Besides that, the shoulder buttons do nothing and “–” opens your menu to access a map and items. It’s simple to understand, but you’d better learn quick as this can be hard to master as you progress.
One criticism of this control scheme however might be that it can be tricky to doge, charge, strike, and aim at the same time when the aforementioned doge, charge and strike are so close together. The use of the shoulder buttons may have alleviated some of the grievances you may run into when faced with tighter time based bumpers, especially when you consider that in order to aim you are required to hold down “Y” while moving the left thumb stick, which also happens to double as the move control. Aside from making last minute doges harder to perform, it can also mean you risk being stunned long enough for the room to restart, which can be frustrating.
The objective of each room is to recharge each of the bumpers that spring up by bouncing the energy balls off each appearing bumper, in order to collect enough energy to open a door to move on. Seems simple enough. As you might expect from a dungeon crawler, each room gets progressively more challenging, some rooms containing secret passages that can lead to new equipment, with the pinball gameplay adding more of a challenging puzzle element to the game. At times this makes Creature in the Well hectic and fast paced, as well as methodical depending on the layout of the room.
In terms of execution, Creature in the Well is responsive, if challenging, and highly addictive thanks to the creative combination of hack-and-slash, pinball, and dungeon exploration. However, it is possible to harvest energy with repeat visits to certain rooms, meaning it is also possible to skip some of the trickier puzzles altogether if you happen to have collected enough energy to active the door at that point.
Even with often tighter budgets to rely on, there have been some truly visually stunning indie games released recently. Yes, many of them rely on pixel art, which while great to see from a retro-throwback perspective, can seem somewhat overused now. Creature in the Well, however, departs from the beloved 8-bit or 16-bit styles we’re used to, opting instead to utilise bold contrasting colours and heavy use of black in a cell-shaded style that omits its more creative design choices. While the mainstay of your gaming time will be within the caves of the mountain, there is also a village outside caught in a raging sandstorm which utilises rusted colours against the desert colour scheme backdrop, itself contrasting against the ambient tones of the mountain. This is an instance where the cover art perfectly reflects the in-game art, which was no doubt a big reason many gamers were interested in the title when it was first announced.
Besides great colour choices and stylish graphics, character and location designs are equally as creative. Each dungeon area follows a coloured theme with subtle changes to the backdrop, helping to differentiate between areas you’ve completed and which areas you’re currently progressing through with a main “lobby” area to pick which levels to tackle. On top of that, each section – with it’s branching pathways – never outstays its welcome, meaning if you’re trapped doing the same few rooms over and over, it’s probably time to “get good.”
Music tends to follow a more ambient, minimalistic orchestration, with percussive sounds that echo in the dark corridors joined by low warbles and synths. There aren’t really any notable tracks to speak of as they tend to operate in the background to add to the atmosphere as you trek deeper into the dark caverns of the mountain. In this sense, the OST does a good job fulfilling its role and compliments the surroundings, creating a kind of soundscape that reflects the backdrop.
If the promise of a new experimental take on well defined genres catches your interest, no doubt you’ll appreciate Creature in the Well. Besides its sometimes hectic gameplay, it is thankfully engaging and highly addictive, making it a great title to either speed through, or play in short bursts. Whether you’re a fan of hack-and-slash, dungeon crawlers, or pinball, Creature in the Well is a must play indie title from Flight School Studio and hopefully the first of many in this new style. Maybe their next project will fuse the ever popular brawler – with the likes of Streets of Rage – with pinball to create the “pinbrawler”…
