Heavily stylised titles have seemingly fallen out of fashion on the gaming market nowadays, despite a community based revival that focuses on helping smaller, independent developers and studios. Unique art and minimalist narrative, features which are beginning to turn into outmoded concepts, sometimes can’t keep up with the treble A titans that dominate the industry at the moment. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be as good.

Animal Gods is designed as a retro throwback then, to give players a chance at wandering around a world with no map, information or HUD while still giving you an experience. Based off Zelda, as seen in the art style, with a top-down perspective and little action throughout, this game compels you to keep playing simply because you want answers.
Taking the role of the ancient priest, called Thistle, the opening dialogue explains that all the Gods that once kept the peace and maintained the order have died, resulting in the most lush apocalypse scene ever. It’s now your singular task to find those Gods, and then free them from their earthly constraints.

And that’s all you get. No signs saying “you are here” or other NPC’s with insight speeches about what happened, that is all you’ve got to go on. The sense of loss, or rather, the feeling of loneliness when you first start playing the game is very heavy, in ridiculous contrast to the vibrant and seemingly alive backdrop.
A hint as to where to go would be lovely, because you can spend far too long just walking around this lovely emptiness on your own, without knowing what you’re doing. But you can trip across ‘diaries’ that only serve to confuse you more as they make reference to a young lady who clearly lived here before.

If you manage to figure out that every way is barred except for the South, then well done, if you didn’t even get that far, then you’ve probably stopped playing. Every title needs a hook, an opening ten minutes that make you want to keep going, or see what happens next. Animal Gods does the exact opposite and gives the player nothing, which is strange, considering that the opening ten minutes of any RPG, the genre that supposedly inspired this title, is filled with monsters galore.

This is a slow experience then, not for those who aren’t fans of experimental ideals or longer puzzle sections. However, if you make it into the first ‘level’, the Gardens of Gwyn, then your peace and calm is about to be interrupted by the most horrid spike in difficulty and tone ever seen. It begins as a simple jumping mechanic, which the player uses to safely pass through the gardens poisonous streams.
Jumping, as a mechanic, then gets put to the test as the player has to pass through areas that are simply riddled with streams that cross over, zig-zag and confuse you as you die over, and over again to touching them.

If you even so much as sneeze near one of these streams, you die. Misjudge that jump by the tiniest of fractions, and you die. While trial and error is the best way of making sure you make the player understand the system, it’s difficult to do so when the system is so amazingly unforgiving. You can’t judge the distance you jump forward though, so either you remember exactly how far you get teleported or you get really, really lucky.
For some bizarre reason however, this hard as nails approach isn’t adopted in the second and third areas, which allow the player to wield a bow and sword respectively, and everything suddenly becomes child’s play.

Animal Gods is an artistically beautiful game with an exceedingly calming soundtrack, but without the gameplay to match the environment that surrounds it. It’s almost as if someone looked at the Legend of Zelda, played some arcade games then decided that Dark Souls was a brilliantly easy beast to master.