Animal Well players discover amazing Ostrich skip, and makes me feel incredibly dumb

Animal Well players have been sharing an awesome discovery that allows them to completely skip one of the most complicated sections of the game, the Ostrich puzzle. While it’s amazing how the game allows for this skip, its discovery also makes me wonder how much of my life I’ve wasted playing legitimately.

In Animal Well, players are presented with puzzles that grow in complexity as they acquire new tools for traversal and that help them interact with the game’s world. However, you don’t need to use these tools for their intended purpose, and the Ostrich skip that many players are using now proves it. In fact, this skip may be the better way to complete the Ostrich puzzle because it avoids a soft lock.

Animal Well’s Ostrich skip made me feel incredibly dumb for solving the entire puzzle

User rw_3eters on the Animal Well subreddit shared what they believed was the legitimate solution to the main Ostrich puzzle. This puzzle requires players to travel over and under quite a large area, pressing buttons before being chased by an Ostrich in a hamster wheel that might crush them. It culminates in a race to press a button to drop the Ostrich into the water and cause it to press the buttons required to open a door.

This skip makes the puzzle, which equates to one of Animal Well‘s boss encounters, entirely unnecessary, though. All you need to do is place the Slink on the left-hand side of the bridge, the main character on the right, and then use the Yo-Yo to drop the bridge, the Slink, and the character onto the buttons to open the door. It’s remarkably simple and makes the legitimate solution’s stress feel unnecessary.

When I saw this, I felt really dumb for not even contemplating it. I didn’t try to open this bridge at all; instead, I moved left to discover the Ostrich and work out the puzzle’s solution based on that. What makes me feel worse is how users in the comments to rw_3eters’ posts are saying they used this, too. I may even be the only player who does not use this solution.

Once I got over the humiliation, I realized what this says about Animal Well. The fact that you can complete a massively complicated puzzle with such a simple solution shows how open it is to be approached in any way players see fit. In fact, this solution helps to avoid soft locking a chest further into the Ostrich area, which you can block once you hit a certain point while solving it.

I can’t help but wonder how many more simple solutions there are out there to the game’s puzzles that maybe even the developer didn’t account for. This post comes mere days after Animal Well was released, so I can’t even imagine what its Any% speedruns will look like at the next GDQ.