Delving deep into the indie horror of Lily’s Well

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While the heyday of indie horror games was arguably a few years back — many people place the golden age of RPG Maker-style indie horror games in particular around 2012 or so — there are still plenty of them around today. And, as it happens, they tend to make great material for YouTubers and streamers to riff on. Such was the case with Lily’s Well, an indie horror game I stumbled across thanks to Game Grumps, of all people.

For those who have never watched Game Grumps, their show is one of the few gaming channels on the Internet that remains primarily dedicated to Let’s Plays of various games, though their emphasis tends to be on the comedic dynamic between main hosts Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan rather than necessarily exactly what it is they’re playing. In the last few months, though, they’ve been seemingly making a point of highlighting some smaller, interesting games, particularly in the horror genre — and Lily’s Well just happened to be one of them.

You can tell they enjoyed it, because their episode ran very long; rather than being the usual 25-30 minutes, it went on for just shy of an hour as they continued to pick at the hidden depths of this title. And, in the end, they left the game behind with a lot undiscovered — things that anyone could start investigating for themselves, particularly given that Lily’s Well is a completely free game, just like its eminently worthwhile genremates Project Kat: Paper Lily Prologue and At Home Alone Final.

Guess what I did almost immediately after watching the episode? That’s right, I downloaded Lily’s Well and proceeded to spend the rest of my evening trying to discover everything it had to offer. And I had a thoroughly enjoyable time.

Lily’s Well is a game in which you take on the role of the eponymous Lily, a nine year old girl who has been left home alone by her father on a rainy night. She hears the voice of someone who appears to be in peril coming from the well outside in her garden, and, being a self-professed “good girl”, decides to investigate. And, from there, exactly what happens is down to the various choices you make.

Lily's Well

Lily’s Well is a cyclical game in that you need to play it through multiple times in order to get the full truth behind the story; the vast majority of endings to the game are “Dead Ends”, though seeing all but three of these is necessary to unlock the game’s true ending.

Each of the ten main endings concludes by giving you one digit of a phone number, and thus it is necessary to piece together this entire phone number to achieve some closure on the narrative. You can’t just look it up, either; if you input the phone number before you’ve triggered all the necessary endings beforehand, you’ll be rebuffed in no uncertain terms and need to find an alternative solution.

Thankfully, achieving the ten endings in question is pretty straightforward, since each of them relate to how far Lily is able to progress down the well before something happens. Specifically, they directly correspond to how many items she is able to find and tie together in order to construct a rope; she then uses this rope to climb down the well and investigate the source of the mysterious voice.

To say too much about what happens under various circumstances would, of course, spoil the experience — but it is worth noting that getting right to the bottom of the well is not the only option for Lily. In fact, given the rather grisly and graphic nature of many of the endings, one might argue that not going down the well at all is really the optimal solution to the entire situation depicted in Lily’s Well — but that’s simply not an option unless you’ve unlocked the true ending, or you go for one of the three optional “Alt Endings”.

Lily's Well

Those three Alt Endings are worth pursuing even if they’re not directly story-relevant, mind, since they unlock additional costumes for Lily. These costumes change her sprite and her portrait in the menu screen — though sadly they don’t change her appearance in the cutscenes.

They offer no gameplay benefits, either — they’re simply an incentive to explore what the game has to offer, to visually express yourself as Lily, and to keep track of what you have and haven’t achieved. They’re also a challenge to track down in a couple of cases — though the game will occasionally provide you with hints in the form of letters that arrive in Lily’s mailbox at the start of a new playthrough.

Lily’s Well is presented in a low-fidelity style similar to something you would have seen on an old 8-bit home computer such as a Commodore 64. It makes use of a deliberately limited colour palette and low resolution pixel art, with most screens being depicted as coloured outlines on a black background. A subtle rolling noise effect is overlaid atop this — though you can switch this off if you prefer, or if it adversely affects performance.

The distinctive art style is combined with spooky chiptune-style music and synthesised sound effects that sound like they were sampled directly from a Commodore 64’s SID chip, though there are occasional and seemingly randomly occurring surprises along the way — I’ll leave those for you to discover for yourself. It’s a very effective means of presenting the game, and while both the event and background art is a little variable in quality over the course of the complete runtime, you’ll certainly find the overall look and feel of Lily’s Well sticking in your mind long after you’ve finished playing it.

Lily's Well

As for the story itself, I will, as previously noted, refrain from providing any spoilers — but I will note that the journey is worth it. Some indie horror games struggle to really wrap things up neatly and instead fizzle out with a sort of vague waft of the hand and a sense of “oooh, was that really happening?” about them — but Lily’s Well features a proper conclusion that ties things up very nicely indeed. Along the way, there are plenty of shocking moments to enjoy, and some surprisingly deep lore to discover — those who have ever looked into the history of alchemy will be particularly pleased.

It takes a while to reach that true ending — my playtime was just shy of 3 hours by the time I’d seen pretty much every possible conclusion and event in the game, including the optional ones — but when it’s all over you won’t be sorry you spent that time helping out Lily. She really is a good girl.

Lily’s Well is available for free right now on Steam and Itch.

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Pete Davison
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