The Well Speaks to Me

About The Well Speaks to Me

The Well Speaks to Me is the first game in Michaela Thisten's NOT ALL THERE series. She made it alone in about a month for a game jam that asked for around 20 minutes of play, and released it on itch.io for Windows in 2020, name your own price. It has been followed by They Watch From The Walls, Like Veins Beneath the Town and A Hollow Harvest.

You play Alice, a young woman who lives by herself in a cabin deep in the forest. Every day has its tasks: turn on the generator, chop the firewood, draw water from the old stone well and make sure nothing down there is spoiling it. Around those chores the questions pile up. Why does nobody come to the forest? Was her family really killed in an accident? What is that thing outside the window?

It plays as a top-down RPG Maker game: you walk Alice around the clearing, the cabin and the woods, look at things and read her remarks, which grow stranger as the days pass. The weather and her mood shift from day to day, the forest goes dark and purple at night, and hand-drawn pictures sit between the pixel maps. Some of the questions get an answer and some do not.

It relies on atmosphere, music and a slow slide from cheerful to unhinged more than on jumpscares. It suits players who like short RPG Maker horror about one person's mind coming apart, and anyone who wants to start a series whose later games build on clues planted here.

How to play The Well Speaks to Me

1. Download The Well Speaks to Me from its itch.io page for Windows; you can pay what you want or nothing.
2. Unzip it and start the game.
3. Walk Alice around the forest and the cabin and do each day's chores: the generator, the firewood, the well.
4. Look at everything and read what she says; small changes from one day to the next tell the story.
5. Keep going day by day until the story reaches its one ending.

Tips

• Check the same places every day; what changes is the point.
• Play at night with headphones; the music carries much of the dread.
• Interact with everything: the maker hid an easter egg that players say takes careful looking to find.
• The story continues in the maker's later NOT ALL THERE games, and some details here are clues for them.

Questions