How to Free the Cats in Animal Well

I don’t know what the cats in Animal Well did to deserve their caged imprisonment, but these docile felines are fairly friendly and will even reward you with an essential item if you save them. So here’s how to free the cats in Animal Well, regardless of their criminal status.

How to Free the Cats in Animal Well

To free the cats in Animal Well, you need to use the Animal Flute to play a series of songs while standing near the cats’ cages. There are five caged cats and five songs you need to play to free all of them.

You can find the cat songs hidden on the shadowed walls within the depths of the Ostrich’s domain. Each song is five notes long, signified by directional arrows showing you which way to point your controller’s analogue stick while playing the flute. If you want to find these songs for yourself, they’re displayed not far from the caged cats, contained in rooms involving the Ostrich domain’s final puzzles leading to the cats themselves and past the ostrich to the G. Flame.

But if you’d rather skip all the exploration and cryptic puzzle-solving, you can just play the songs outright without needing to find them. Here are the directional inputs for all five of the songs you need to play to free the cats in Animal Well:

• In the room with three caged cats:
  • Up-left, up-left, down-left, down-left, down
  • Down-right, left, up-left, down-right, right
  • Right, up-right, up, up-left, down
• In the room with two caged cats located down the ladder from the three-caged cats room:
  • Left, down, down-left, down-right, up
  • Down-right, up, down-right, down-right, left

When you play a song on the Animal Flute, remember that you need to press square (on PS5) for each individual note you play. You don’t need to input the song quickly, so feel free to take your time and carefully line up your analogue stick in the required direction before pressing square for each note. If you’ve successfully played a song correctly, the five dots above a caged cat’s chains will light up yellow, and the cage’s sides will open, allowing the cat to jump out and run away. If you’ve inputted a song incorrectly, the dots will light up red, and you’ll have to replay the song from the beginning.

Once you’ve freed all five cats, they’ll vanish into Animal Well’s depths. But seek out their home, and they’ll have a nice reward waiting for you: a Wheel.

How to Find the Bobcat Room and Get the Wheel in Animal Well

After freeing the caged cats in Animal Well, you can find the wheel located in the bobcat room within the seahorse’s domain (lower-left quadrant of the map). But to get to the bobcat room, you’ll first need the Top tool, obtained as a reward for finding 32 eggs.

Once you have the Top, head to the save room beneath where you first encountered the seahorse and climb down the ladder descending to the next room. Head left one screen, and you should find yourself in a room with a large bobcat statue and a puzzle you had to solve that involved throwing the Disc to hit a switch up a vertical brickway. On the ground left of the bobcat statue’s base, use the Top to reveal a hidden passageway tunneling to another room. Follow this newly opened passageway to enter the bobcat room.

In the bobcat room, you’ll find a large bobcat sitting in the background and a closed cage holding a chest. If you successfully freed the five cats, the bobcat will start singing, opening the cage. You can then use your B. Wand to descend down, jump into the cage, and open up the chest to reveal the Wheel. After you get the Wheel, equip it to safely drop down from the cage and roll over the spikes on the ground, exiting the room.

And now that you’ve rescued Animal Well’s cats and have the Wheel in your inventory, you can use it to solve even more puzzles and collect more eggs.