“Don’t read anything,” chanted Animal Well reviewers. “Go in blind.”
This mysterious Metroidvania platformer was best experienced with no preconceptions and no spoilers. No need to consult their reviews – at least, not until you’d bought and finished the game.
So I didn’t read anything before buying it. I navigated a little creature through a moody, sprawling network of caverns, unlocking doors and evading enemies. When I spied inaccessible doors and passageways, I knew I’d collect tools to open them up, no doubt aided by some late-game fast travel or teleportation mechanic. The intricate level design and placement of environmental elements hinted at untold layers of puzzles.
But an hour in, after I’d failed twenty times at jumping on bubbles to reach a switch, I quit. “So I’m done! Seems like a nice game! Don’t understand what all the fuss was for!” I texted friends who’d completed it. “I was expecting it to, like, become an FPS or something.”
“It does not turn into an FPS. It’s not Inscryption, Pony Island or Frog Fractions,” replied Alex. “It’s a nice little puzzle platformer but the platforming is moderately hard and it gets significantly harder later. The puzzles are pretty good and there’s a lot of ambient information in the levels that makes more sense as you continue to play … There are some nice moments of discovery where things you could do all along turn out to be more useful than immediately obvious. It’s a game!”
By all accounts, Animal Well is a very good game. I just can’t agree with “don’t read anything”. If I had read something like Alex’s account, I would’ve known it wasn’t for me and avoided it. I’m not that good at platformers; Fez is about as much as I’m comfortable with.
I can only blame myself. I should’ve ignored the hype and trusted publications not to include spoilers in their reviews. Indeed, Edge’s review mentions the challenging platform gameplay without giving away any real secrets.
Every game with a narrative or world to explore has secrets many players would prefer not to know in advance. But while Inscryption and Frog Fractions have enjoyable mega-twists, squeamish players really should read something before playing the former. Outer Wilds is one awe-inspiring moment after the next, but if you aren’t comfortable with piloting a lander in 3D space with real physics, you really shouldn’t buy it.
Today, the games industry is divided between games that are endlessly replayable, like Fortnite, Minecraft, MMOs, and sports, strategy, and puzzle games; and games that are played once or twice, like Outer Wilds, The Last of Us, and Alan Wake 2. There’s a lot of overlap between the two, but endlessly replayable games are consuming far more of players’ time and money, for various reasons I won’t bother going into here.
The games we’re told not to read about are the less-replayable ones. I often reflect on the fact that an advantage of suffering head trauma is that I could experience Return of the Obra Dinn anew. It’s this desire to preserve feelings of revelation and discovery that underpins “don’t read anything”, yet the perfect media consumption experience is essentially unobtainable for all but the most privileged and committed, a valorisation of the completionist.
I saw The Favourite totally unspoiled – I didn’t even know Emma Stone was in it – but only because I went to a pre-release screening. I saw Poor Things as a civilian, after trailers and posters and social media reactions theoretically “spoiled” some of the most incredible sets and shots. It was a special treat to see The Favourite that way, but I loved them both. The best works of art have so many moments of revelation, and are so good independent of those moments, that a little diminishment in the service of criticism and discussion and, frankly, sensible marketing is well justified. The last thing anyone wants is someone buying a game they were never going to enjoy.
My friend, novelist and game designer Naomi Alderman, has always rejected spoiler culture, while I insisted on the special pleasures of experiencing plot twists. As time has passed and I’ve watched and read more things, especially older movies that have been well and truly “spoiled” for decades, I’ve come around to her way of thinking. I recently listened to a podcast which, after much warning, discussed an epic final action sequence in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. There is something about the controls in modern Zelda games that completely eludes me, so their description was the best I was going to get, and what I heard of the action sequence charmed me so much I still daydream about how thrilling it must’ve been.
A strict adherence to spoiler culture denies these second-hand moments of appreciation in favour of a canonical approach to media, an attitude of “to be part of gaming discourse, you need to play this game right now, in this particular way”. Again, that’s not an attack, but a comment on how algorithmic social media simultaneously flattens and polarises discourse that’s intended for a particular community but ends up travelling far wider.
I can’t count the number of things I’ve enjoyed as a direct result of them having been “spoiled” for me. In this context, the notion of a spoiler is a category error. Telling someone in the queue for Empire Strikes Back that Vader is Luke’s father is a spoiler; describing the themes and plot of La Chimera to convince someone to give it a chance is not.
I don’t have any easy answers on fixing this. Spoiler culture is, in part, an outgrowth of the idea that the joy of art and entertainment is primarily about surprise and discovery, an illusion that benefits more than a few parties. All I can say is that next time, I will read something.
Thanks to cissy on the Garbage Day Discord for coining the title of this post.
mssv 