It’s a rare treat getting to see an artist’s craft evolve gradually, especially when it comes to video games. It’s a medium in which works are often crafted by teams in the triple digits, and even a lot of smaller-scale games are touched by dozens and dozens of people before you get your hands on them. Meanwhile, “solo-ish” developer Kyle Thompson has been steadily releasing a new metroidvania every two years, handling just about everything on the creative front (besides the soundtracks, which are composed by his brother), and they’re some of the best contemporary entries in the genre. As someone that’s followed his work since the already excellent Islets (2022), each of his games has been better than the last, and Well Dweller is hands down my favorite Kyle Thompson joint thus far.
If you’re familiar with Metroidvanias, Well Dweller isn’t going to require much setup here. Playing as little bird Glimmer, you’re sent out by your mom to grab some berries from a hunter’s cabin for her and the rest of your family. The world of Well Dweller is an unkind dark fairy tale, and it’s especially unkind towards birds. Told from a sidescrolling perspective, Glimmer will be exploring this dangerous environment, with not much more than a matchstick for combat purposes, searching for the path forward, and discovering new abilities that let you access and traverse new areas of the game.
Much like Kyle Thompson’s previous games, Well Dweller doesn’t stray far at all from the standard metroidvania formula, instead carving out its own niche in smaller match strokes. For instance, you will never acquire a double jump, that longtime staple of explorative platformers. The closest equivalent is actually the first major ability you do find, which allows you to attach your matchstick to a wall by slinging it, thus enabling you to bounce off of it to gain much more height than a standard jump. What might initially feel like a small change to the standard sidescroller verbset ends up shifting a lot of the level design in ways I didn’t necessarily expect, causing me to have to stop and consider certain screens of Well Dweller in ways I’m not used to from a genre as well worn as this one. And this is just the first traversal ability of the game!
These creative swerves never cease, with each main area in Well Dweller usually containing its own region-specific mechanic. A personal favorite section was when I gained permission from an old dock master to pilot a submarine and explore underwater to search for his missing sailors. This briefly turned the game into a slower-paced, deep-sea-diving exploration, complete with abilities to acquire exclusively during my brief stint piloting the submarine. To spoil much more of these area gimmicks would be a crime, but suffice it to say that the game never stopped surprising me across my 12 or so hours with it.
What separates Well Dweller from Kyle Thompson’s previous games, and most other metroidvanias, is that aforementioned dark fairy tale style and tone. There’s always been a tinge of melancholy to his games (Crypt Custodian is, after all, a game where you’re playing as a recently deceased pet cat meeting and helping other pets in the afterlife), but Well Dweller feels more threatening and ominous than you might be expecting—yes, you’re playing as a cute little bird whacking things with a matchstick, and most of the friendly NPCs are just as adorable, but the unsettling boss designs and their tragic backstories feel like they would fit more to something like Over the Garden Wall than what you might expect from a Metroidvania.
It’s that blend of cute and unnerving that really pushed Well Dweller over the top for me (as well as compelled me to absolutely devour the game in just a couple of sittings; I couldn’t put it down). The tone also contributed to my favorite collectible in the game, namely individual pages of various books that collectively give you the backstory on some of the major adversaries in the game. Not only are these backstories genuinely interesting, but the artwork created for them is absolutely gorgeous, adopting some kind of medieval woodblock print style for their pages; it’s a true triumph of aesthetic design when I get even more excited finding pages of a book about a whistling young boy ascending a tower every night than I do gaining additional fun traversal abilities in a game like this.
If there’s one (small) complaint I have, it’s that the combat doesn’t quite live up to the rest of the package. To be clear, the boss fights are undeniably excellent, combining traditional sidescrolling combat and platforming with some light bullet hell-esque attack patterns to avoid. It’s really the combat against standard enemies that falters a bit, mostly due to a severe lack of enemy variety.
On top of your standard matchstick for melee swipes, you’re also equipped with a downward slam move, a projectile that refreshes as you successfully land melee attacks, a dodge roll, and a heal. This movekit is more than serviceable, especially given how customizable the character-building potential is with the trinket system in the game. Largely though, besides enemies that shoot projectiles and/or fly, pretty much everything can be defeated by getting a couple swipes in, dodge rolling behind, and starting the loop over again. This is more of an observation than a full on critique, as Well Dweller seems far more concerned in giving you interesting areas to platform through than combat arenas to bang your head against. This largely just meant that said combat arenas were pretty forgettable, whereas the (completely optional) time trial challenges caused me to sit up a little straighter, controller held a bit tighter in my hands.
To dwell on that would be to miss the forest for the trees, though—it’s the entire package, and how singular and cohesive it all feels, that draws me to Kyle Thompson’s games. If anything’s more rare in the video game space than seeing someone’s craft evolve and strengthen over time, it’s each individual game in their body of work achieving this high of a level of quality, each with even more gameplay ideas than the previous one, each with things to say about the world and corrupt power structures and kindness, and each entry having a beating heart powered by a clear love for the act of creating. I eagerly await his next one (in about two years, hopefully).
