While exploring Animal Well‘s pretty expansive underground world, you might not realize that you could be marking the map every time you find a puzzle you can’t solve or a collectible just out of reach to make your life easier later.
Following a successful launch, players are diving headfirst into Animal Well, the first game from Videogamedunkey’s publisher Bigmode. The game is designed to challenge you with puzzles you won’t understand or even find until you’ve completed other tasks elsewhere. However, one important note players are sharing as they discover it is that you can mark the map to give yourself pointers for areas where you’ve still got something to do.
How to find and use The Stamp in Animal Well
To mark the map in Animal Well, you need to open the map in-game and press the button that corresponds to the time you want to use to mark it. You can use a pencil to draw on the map, but you can also find an item called The Stamp. The Stamp allows you to stamp icons on Animal Well’s map to help you remember bosses, enemies, or just something you noticed that might be important later.
You’ll find The Stamp up and to the left from where you found the map. Climb the ladders in the room with the green penguins and head left to find a room with four doors. The Stamp is in the chest you find in this room.
The game is built so that if you get stuck on certain parts of it, such as the Chameleon boss, you can come back later because there’s so much else you could be doing or a new area to explore at the same time. This type of open-ended gameplay really benefits from the map-marking mechanics because you’re encouraged to get out there and go anywhere.
Animal Well‘s world is dense and surprisingly large by the time you’ve explored most of it. The map seems to go on and on, even when you think you’ve found every secret, item, and collectible. Marking the map makes your life so much easier in the long run because you can open it and instantly see areas you haven’t explored or where you noticed something you need to return to.
For your own sanity, please don’t neglect this feature. I did, and when I saw others using it, I had to put the game down, cradle my head in my hands, and let the waves of emotion, mostly humiliation, wash over me before I could get back to exploring.
Map markers were a great help when it came to noting the parts of rooms with openings to other rooms that I couldn’t reach with my current equipment. Items you acquire after a certain point allow you to explore previously unreachable areas, so having these marked made my next session of exploration so much easier.
