How to complete layer four of Animal Well

Even though Basso himself said there are only three layers of Animal Well, there exists yet another series of secrets that the community refers to as “layer four.”

Unlike the “canon” layers, there’s no explicit collectible hunting to be done here. Instead, Animal Well’s fourth layer consists of carrying out incredibly specific tasks across multiple playthroughs, that the game doesn’t necessarily hint at, to unlock a series of symbols (usually referred to as unicode or wingdings). These include tasks like speedrunning the game, letting a boss hit you several times on Groundhog Day, and circumventing the solution of a layer two puzzle.

By piecing these clues together, you can uncover another series of directions similar to the end of layer three, which unlocks yet another secret. To be clear, you don’t need to uncover all of these clues yourself. If you’re just interested in the reward, you can look up the answer online and follow the directions without any consequence.

Your reward for completing layer four: Completing this task will trigger a spoken message from developer Billy Basso, Shared Memory’s “business/marketing guy” Dan Adelman, and publisher BigMode’s Jason Gastrow (better known by his YouTube persona videogamedunkey). It’s a sweet little thank you message for making it this far, and apparently Gastrow has been stuck in the code of the game for 277 years.