thomas ohashi / blog

I guess I'm a La-Mulana person now

Monday, February 14th, 2025

Prologue: Barbuta

It all started with UFO 50, or more specifically, with Barbuta.

Barbuta is chronologically the first game in UFO 50 and seems to be very polarizing. The game feels quite hostile towards the player with its surprise traps, numerous hazards, erratic enemy movement, and awkward controls. There is also no music.

That said, if you manage to persevere and dive deeper into the game you will find an elegant and meticulously crafted puzzle box — one that I found almost as satisfying to solve as Outer Wilds. I don’t want to spoil too much of the game but you might experience something like this:

• How do I get that?
• Oh that’s how I get it.
• What does it do?
• Oh it does that.
• Oh wow, I can also get it this way.
• Wait, do I even need to do that???

And so on. Like Outer Wilds you could maybe call this game a metroidbrainia. There are no persistent upgrades but following different routes will yield new information that you will then go on to use to find even more routes until you finally understand how to complete the game. I loved it.

After finishing the game I found out that the designer is a big fan of the game La-Mulana, which I had always assumed to be something of a kaizo style game, but riding the high of Barbuta I figured I would give it a shot. It took many hours and extensive use of a guide but in the end, La-Mulana rewired my brain.

La-Mulana

Like Barbuta, La-Mulana is filled with traps and your movement is kind of awkward, but the game is surprisingly generous in many ways. Most fundamental is that you can save your game, which is pretty important considering the game is absolutely massive. Once you get the hang of the controls it is actually quite easy to avoid enemies, and assuming you find the item in the first area, you can access fast travel whenever you want! You also have a proper life bar that you can increase, so it is much easier to stay alive. That does not however, make it an easier game.

Some of the bosses are admittedly pretty bad and there are some relatively frustrating platforming areas, but the real challenge is solving all of the puzzles. There are countless tablets with vague references to such and such or so and so and it turns out that most of them are hints to a puzzle somewhere, which you may not come across for dozens of hours. I foolishly thought I could keep it straight in my head but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Fortunately someone called Cheshire_1 on Steam made an amazing hint based guide.

I had a fantastic 15 hours where I felt like I was mostly solving things while occasionally looking up hints in the guide. Finding puzzles and solutions felt incredible and discovering new secrets about areas I had already been through was pleasantly mind-blowing. Unfortunately the puzzles went much deeper than that, and for the subsequent 15 hours I transitioned from referencing the guide as needed to completely following it and still feeling confused. What Nigoro has done with La-Mulana is legitimately remarkable but some of the puzzles are so obtuse that beating the game without a guide is basically impossible. The last big puzzle is so ridiculous that even with a guide I found it kind of infuriating.

In spite of all that, I still cherish my time with La-Mulana. It’s a little hard to put into words but it ended up becoming a “place” I enjoyed spending time in, something that only rarely happens when I am genuinely, fully absorbed in something. Other examples for me would be Breath of the Wild and Earthbound, not coincidentally my two favorite games. The first half of La-Mulana alone is almost enough to place it amongst them, but the second half drags it down a notch or two. Fortunately there is a sequel that so far seems to have a more fair but no less impressive design...

Epilogue: Animal Well

If I have any regrets, it’s that I played La-Mulana before Animal Well, which I did enjoy but felt rather underwhelmed by in comparison. I think La-Mulana is more successful at gradually encouraging the player to engage with increasingly complicated puzzles while Animal Well provides you with a charming but fairly straightforward base game, then follows it with an abrupt pixel hunt before you can even really get started with the more complicated puzzles.

Moving around also felt more tedious in Animal Well due to a less convenient fast travel system and the fussiness (IMO) of some of the traversal mechanics. I did not feel motivated enough to do much of the post game beyond an additional search for eggs before looking a few things up and deciding that no, as a matter of fact I do not want to do all of that.

I feel bad coming across so negatively about Animal Well as I do think it’s a lovely game but La-Mulana might have changed my life. I’m already 20 hours into La-Mulana 2 and, assuming all it does is commit less sins than the first game, it’s primed to be one of my all time favorite games.