Billy Basso was glued to his computer. It was launch day for the Chicago developer's debut solo game, a surreal Metroidvania called Animal Well, and he couldn't stop reading reviews online and watching people play the game. He'd pulled off the impossible: breaking through a turbulent industry to create a hit game that would grow to be a critical and commercial success. He just didn't realize how big of one it would be quite yet. Most successful video games are made by teams of people that vary in size from a half dozen to somewhere in the hundreds.

The dark aperture of a well has always been an alluring focus of human fascination. Giver of life-sustaining water, it is also seen as a portal to a warren of risky secrets; our fables are littered with wailing children whose curiosity got the better of them, consigned to an eternity of damp gazing up toward the distant, unreachable circle of light. Animal Well, an indie game seven years in the making, sends us down into one of these twilight labyrinths, a cave system of incessant dripping and darting creatures whose fur is tinged with luminescence. The goals are unstated but obvious: explore, map, emerge. It is a quest that soon becomes an obsession.

It took Billy Basso seven years to make Animal Well, the dense, dark Metroidvania game that crashed onto Steam's top-seller chart earlier this month amid a flurry of player hype. The game is a labyrinth exercise where players wander a world inhabited by sometimes friendly, sometimes not-friendly creatures as a small, very able blob. It's emblematic of what's possible with indie games--a breed that could be on the brink of extinction. Animal Well is light on instruction. Part of the game is figuring out how to play. It all but requires players to interact in Discord or Reddit communities when their puzzle-solving dead-ends.

There was a time when it was possible to play pretty much every interesting video game released in a given year, from nailed-down 9/10 blockbusters to that divisive horror curio. That's not the case now – not only because games have gotten longer and more involving, as I wrote about last week, but also because so many of them are released. The publisher model, where a few big companies controlled the release calendar, has given way to a mix of legacy megaliths (Sony, EA, Nintendo, Microsoft), indie publishers (Devolver, Annapurna, Team17), self-releasing developers and everything in between. How is a player supposed to keep up? Good curation is one of the most useful things a games critic can offer in 2022.

In January 2020, players of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time stumbled on a buried spaceship: a fully functional "Arwing" fighter from another classic Nintendo game, Star Fox 64. The Arwing was added as a programmer's shortcut to, essentially, teach a dragon how to fly. Once the dragon was airborne, the ship was hidden away in Ocarina of Time's source code, where hackers unearthed it 22 years later. "It's amazing to me that it was there all this time – it just took a lot of digging to find it," says Billy Basso, a game developer from Chicago. "It's completely inessential, but it helps people bond with how games are made, the creators behind them and the time and place. It connects you to history in a way."