It's a deeply unhappy time for game developers, as anyone paying attention to the games industry this year will know. Thousands of jobs have fallen victim to corporate cost-cutting, as in-progress games have been cancelled and award-winning studios closed. The mood is furious and despondent.
"I feel such despair for the medium I love," a reader wrote in response to last week's newsletter. "The layoffs have been so disheartening from the potential that's being squandered in the name of even more grotesque levels of profit taking, let alone the impact this is having on the people who actually make the games." He asked: "Do you see a way forward for developers to make great games on a decent budget and pay their staff a living wage? Some hope would be appreciated."
One of the many tragic ironies about the year in games so far is that at the same time as all these cuts, closures and layoffs, we are also seeing an extraordinary number of breakout successes. Nobody expected much from satirically militaristic squad shooter Helldivers 2 but it has sold 12m copies since February. Palworld might have left me feeling vaguely gross, but it has raked in money. Balatro, the poker roguelike that stole a whole week of my free time, had a million sales, and that was made by one person. In early access on Steam, we've had medieval township-simulator Manor Lords and Supergiant's incredible Hades II racking up huge player numbers.
This week I've been playing Animal Well, which I've been looking forward to for a while, and it's yet another top-tier example of a smaller game that gets everything right. If you yearn for a pre-internet time when games felt mysterious and unknowable, it is made for you, though naturally a squadron of unfathomably dedicated players on Discord are hard at work trying to uncover its every hidden secret. It has the lo-fi look and limited colour palette of a forgotten game once played on school computers, but with exquisite lighting, sound and visual detail far beyond what any game of a bygone era could achieve.
You play a blob with eyes, birthed into a subterranean labyrinth full of creatures that mostly want to eat you, but you don't fight them - you have to either hide from them or outsmart them. One of the first creatures I found was a terrifying bandy-legged ostrich that lurched towards me, emitting unacceptably distorted squawks. I screamed at the TV, then jumped down a hole to hide from it, only for its beak to follow me into the crevice I was cowering within. It was the perfect combination of hilarious and disturbing.
I am loathe to share any more details from my time with Animal Well in case they ruin an "ah-ha!" moment for anyone else. It is superb, and so far I am successfully resisting the urge to get sucked into Reddit threads about all of its hidden facets, so my discoveries are all my own.
Animal Well is one of many reminders this year that even at the worst times for the games industry at large, there is always, always something interesting to play - because people will always be driven to create. When that is the goal, rather than maximising of profit, there is always room to succeed.
If you thought I'd already covered all the great indie games of the past few weeks, surprise: arthouse studio Annapurna is just about to release another, called Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. It's a Lynchian, mostly monochrome detective puzzle game of interconnected riddles, set in a haunted mansion where time folds in on itself and the architecture has no interest in following the laws of physics. Atmospherically, it reminds me a bit of 2002's Eternal Darkness, the GameCube psychological horror game. The kind of game that will have you filling a real-life notebook with insane-looking looping thoughts and theories.
Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch from 16 May
Estimated playtime: Around 12-15 hours
Loads of you wrote in to respond to last week's question about video games set in believable real-world places, so rather than answer a new one, I'm going to hand over the floor.
Reader Ethan highlights an underrated British game: "Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was really the first time I'd felt an uncanny impression of normality represented in a game; unremarkable pavements and telegraph poles, a beer garden picnic table, correct fonts on road signs, and unmown lawns were all well-observed details which combined to evoke a quiet village that I felt I might have actually passed through at some point."
Kenny writes: "I thought I'd just pass on what a Polish colleague recently told me. She said the wedding in The Witcher 3's Hearts of Stone expansion perfectly captured those she'd attended as a girl. She's a fan of the game in general, but when I mentioned that I'd recently picked it up again, her eyes lit up, and it was this one detail that she couldn't wait to share."
I will answer a new question next week. If you've got something to ask for Question Block - or anything else to say about the newsletter - hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
