Lily's Well (PC) review "Nothing ends well..."

Horror stories often begin with average, mundane worlds that slowly unravel as you delve further into them. Characters might enter a new house, a quiet town, a campground, a secluded beach, or any other handful of seemingly harmless places or scenarios, only to realize that something sinister is at work. And not only that, but deeper terrors reside in the details and origins of the terrifying situations in which they find themselves. The freeware horror title Lily's Well operates a bit like that...

Lily lives in a forest with her single father, doing nothing more with her time than being a child. She plays, knits things with her yarn, and watches cute VHS tapes while Papa goes to work at night. He instructs her to stay in the house at all costs because a forest can be a dangerous place for little girl. This setup works out fine until Lily hears someone crying for help, the voice emanating from a nearby well. The well's rope is also gone, so whoever is down there can't climb out. So what else does the girl do except try to find a way to rescue the person?

Seriously, she's a lot braver than I am. I would've just called 911. Of course, you can attempt to do so here, but Papa taught Lily not to dial that number. Curious...

Lily decides to craft her own rope out of household items: belts, bed sheets, toilet paper, yarn, vines, and even mysterious oily hair found in a garden...

Wait, what?



You see, things seem pretty ordinary when you begin this graphic adventure. You roam around Lily's home and the surrounding grounds, looking for tools and keys, hoping to eventually secure enough strong material to piece together a rope that takes you downward. However, the more you play, the more you peel back layers and behold the actual horror at the heart of this adorable affair. You ask: why is there strange, oily hair in the garden? Why is there a cave next to the stream that contains your birthday card? However, you might be inclined to ignore these weird details because you have work to do. You'll need to figure out how to obtain the rope from your tire swing, or how to open Papa's safe in his closet, or how to enter the aforementioned cavern in the first place...

The first campaign beats play out like your standard graphic adventure. Every scenario requires a different item or a small bit of attention, but can be solved pretty easily. You learn quickly that large stones found around the forest make a handy path through the stream, and that a dagger located within the cave fits into a monument in the garden. After some trial and error, you manage to piece together a homemade strand to send down into the depths, where horrible discoveries await you...

For instance, gravity... The narrative doesn't tell you how long your rope should be or what items are best to use, so you experiment. Wonky goods lead to a line that rips instantly, causing Lily to plummet into the darkness below. From there, you wonder if the game didn't lock up because it sits on the same screen for ages—for emphasis—before a sickening thud sounds from the depths. A prompt informs you that, fortunately, Lily landed on her head and died instantly.
Fortunately.



And yes, the graphics do lock up occasionally. Turning off its filter cuts back on this bug drastically, but it doesn't entirely cut it out altogether. Thankfully, the game autosaves frequently, so you never lose any progress.

You've peeled back another layer now: this tale isn't messing around. Lily isn't merely going to get a boo-boo or drop off the screen, a la Mario, and vanish with a cute little ditty. She's liable to suffer horrific fates in her quest for altruism. Of course, that means you need to consider the best equipment to get the job done, as well as test out different rope lengths.

Obviously, things like toilet paper prove flimsy, so you forgo taking it. Other objects require a little bit of logic or clue-reading before you settle on using them. One, for instance, sits inside of a locked cabinet in Papa's room. What could the code possibly be? Well, as I mentioned before, there is a birthday card in the aforementioned cave, and birth dates make handy number codes...

You tinker with a few different cables, yielding mixed and yet similar results. In one situation, Lily's rain-and-sweat slicked hands betray her, causing her to slide off the strand. An image of her broken body pops up on the screen, telling you to take failure to heart and make sure this never occurs again. So you braid a longer lariat and find you way into a drainage tunnel. Success? No, instead you get washed out by a deluge that sends you absolutely tumbling through rock-infested waters that batter your little frame.



And let's not forget other fates that don't involve the well, such as being run over by a car or torn apart by a woodland predator...

Lily's Well doesn't stray from brutality, practically punishing you and Lily until you get things right. However, every result is the same: Lily tries, dies, and wakes up in her bed. There's a reason for that. And every time she wakes up, new stimuli pops up or certain puzzles remain solved. Also curious... As you can imagine, this is another layer peeling itself back and exposing a harsher truth than our heroine is willing to accept.

...At least until she finally gets down to the bottom of the well and makes a startling discovery. I won't spoil it, but it only adds a tinge of sadness and helplessness to the proceedings. However, hope comes with death, as each individual fate provides you with a random digit that appears to be part of a phone number. Remember, I did imply Lily has access to a phone...

When you've pealed back enough layers, you realize it's not just an anime-inspired trip with an adorable little girl trying to be a good Samaritan, but commentary on corporal punishment and the use of trauma to condition children into good behavior. In other words, it's a downbeat sort of affair rife with smart puzzles that doesn't shy away from disturbing imagery and concepts. It's all in an effort to convince you to do things right, because it's for your own good.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 22, 2023) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.