Pictured: Lily, before the night goes horribly wrong.
Lily's Well is a freeware horror game by Pure Ice Blue, the creator of I Cannot Drown, made in the RPG Maker MV engine. In 2005, a young girl named Lily Tabacchi wakes up in the middle of the night hearing someone calling for help outside her window. To save the unknown person, Lily gets out of bed and gathers things around her house to use as rope for the rescue.
The game is available both through Itch.io
and Steam. While the game's contents are completely available for free, a Bonus Pack is available through both Itch.io and Steam that contains a digital artbook and the raw cutscene graphics.
On July 20, 2023, Pure Ice Blue released Lily's Birthday, a video showing what happened to Lily after the events of the game.
Not to be confused with Lily's Garden or A Little Lily Princess.
Lily’s Well contains examples of:
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The sewer area is made up of large pipes that Lily can walk through.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The titular Lily starts begging Antonio not to shoot her in one ending.
- Awful Truth: Lily is a homunculus that has been killed in experiments multiple times to see if her soul can retain trauma while her brain gets to start fresh with every death.
- Big Bad: Professor Antonio Tabacchi is keeping the person in the well captive and is the leader of the College of Azoth cult who repeatedly lures Lily to her death to keep her from ever leaving him.
- Body Horror: Like with Ice's other games, this game is full of it.
- The monsters found in the default vent ending are made of twisted flesh and broken bones. One additionally is missing the top half of its head, but is still alive.
- The monster in the woods is a large head with a body made of many Lily bodies fused together.
- Many of the endings leave Lily's body in a mutilated state.
- Boom, Headshot!: In the ending where Lily reaches the bottom of the well, Antonio shoots her in the forehead with a pistol.
- Character Portrait: One of Lily is viewable in the game's menu.
- Cheshire Cat Grin: One of the monsters in the vent ending has a permanent large smile on its face.
- Cruelty Is the Only Option: While not needed to get the ending, the only way to get the Master ID Card is to kill Freddy Fungus, who is sleeping on the couch.
- Cult: The College of Azoth is run by Alchemists that wear hooded robes and create human experiments.
- Developer's Foresight: Quite a few examples:
- If the shed is unlocked in a previous run, it will stay unlocked for any run after it.
- The same also applies to the places where you found all of the rocks to use for the river.
- If you call the full phone number before getting all of the rope endings, you won't be given the true ending in that run, as Lily doesn't remember why she knows it and won't know to ask for help.
- If you go down to the bottom of the well twice after having killed Freddy Fungus the first time, the couch he was sleeping on will be empty save for the Master ID and a blood stain. Lily’s father will also be waiting for her at the top floor instead of the cloaked students, killing her almost instantly.
- Dice Roll Death: Freddy Fungus' death was mostly due to him taking a nap in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
- Also, some of Lily's deaths could be contributed to this, such as the Vehicular Manslaughter ending and potentially the Rope Ending 4note .
- Downer Ending: All of the Dead Ends have Lily die somehow.
- Down the Rabbit Hole: The initial given goal of the game is to climb down the Well found by Lily's home.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: The only real happy ending can only be obtained by getting all of the rope endings (and killing Lily multiple times) and calling the complete phone number obtained from these endings.
- The Ending Changes Everything: The reveal of the Lily you play as being a homunculus clone of the original Lily, who is resurrected in another body every time she dies, gives an explanation for many of the items and strange happenings found around the game, in addition to being an instance of Multiple Endings where all of the endings are canon.
- Eye Scream: Lily's eyes appear to be plucked out in the sewer pipe ending.
- The Faceless: Papa's face is never seen, except for his sprite.
- Facial Horror: In one ending, Lily's face gets disfigured.
- Flashback: A rare event can be found inside the pantry, which shows the death of Lily's mother.
- Floral Motifs: Lily herself is named after a flower, but flowers can be found all throughout the game. You can also unlock a flower-themed costume for her to wear.
- Foreshadowing:
- There is a birthday card in the cave for Lily's first birthday, but it's dated in 1985 and the game is set in 2005, yet Lily is only nine years old. This is because she isn't the original Lily.
- If you investigate the TV, Lily mentions a program on fire safety she watched where her dad would skip one point and tell her never to call the number on-screen. If you go to the phone and try to dial 911, Lily says her dad calls it a "no-no number" because it'll bring people to their house. The game isn't subtle that something nefarious is going on, but these are the first and easiest to find instances, only getting confirmation and explanation after multiple bad endings.
- This can also be seen as an ironic note foreshadowing of the true ending, where the house, and presumably the College of Azoth alongside Antonio Tabacchi and its personnel are burned to ash through the use of copious amounts of kerosene and the inherent flammability of Azoth.
- There are some Anti-Frustration Features that allow for subsequent playthroughs to be a little shorter, like the shed remaining open after Lily has first unlocked it in subsequent playthroughs. In addition, things change in every playthrough, like the Hidden Ending (Mother) having the way to it blocked if you return to it. This might seem odd from a story perspective, until the reveal that Lily has been dying over and over again and transported to a new body every time she dies, so all of the endings happen in the same timeline and all of them are canon.
- Within the well are various monsters and corpses. Looking closely, you might notice that they look a lot like Lily, especially the corpses at the bottom of the well — because they are her other bodies who died before by falling into the well or otherwise.
- The hair in the tombstone and all throughout the lab is described as being "oily," and is just as flammable as real oil.
- The "Don't Feed the Wildlife" ending requires Lily to empty a bag of jerky by feeding it to a monster over the course of several lives, which is only possible if each Lily comes after the other.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: The monster in the woods.
- Godiva Hair: The Lily body growing in the homunculus lab in the well bottom ending is covered up by her long hair.
- Gotta Catch Them All: The majority of endings are caused by collecting different amounts of rope materials.
- Guide Dang It!: While most are obvious, a run can be completely ruined by accidentally picking up one bad rope piece; one of the changes added in the 1.1 version was the ability to throw out unwanted pieces via a trash can at the side of the road, but the player would still need to know which pieces are bad. Some required items are additionally hard to find.
- Hell Is That Noise: Every time the rope breaks due to bad materials or a certain ending, a very distinct sound is played.
- Homage:
- The usage of large shears, the achievement name for the vent ending, and the game overs being called Dead Ends are all references to the Clock Tower series.
- Lily's hat is likely based on Koishi Komeiji from the Touhou Project.
- The achievement for the vine ending is named Feed Me Lily, Feed Me in reference to Little Shop of Horrors.
- The achievement for the maggot ending is named Itchy, Tasty in reference to Resident Evil.
- The VHS tapes by the television contain references to Creating Rem Lezar and ProtonJon's Let's Play of Superman 64.
- Human Resources: The wall board and Antonio's offhanded mention of using "meat" to make the clones implies they're somehow made from people who were abducted.
- Improvised Weapon: The titular Lily usually wields a pair of shears from the garden, which can be used to kill Freddy Fungus.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: In one bad ending, Antonio refers to a couple of previous Lilys as "it" instead of "she".
- Innocent Bystander: In her developer commentary livestream, Pure Blue Ice states that Freddy Fungus was actually innocent, or at least was not involved in the homunculi project.
- Jump Scare: Dialogue in some of the endings get interrupted by Lily's cause of death.
- Kill It with Fire: The true ending has Lily and the original Lily burn the house down, with the hair found growing everywhere spreading the fire to the College of Azoth, likely killing many of those inside due to the stairs being out of order.
- Killed Off for Real: If you kill Freddy Fungus, he will remain dead unless the save file is completely reset.
- Pure Ice Blue also created an afterstory video that shows that Freddy's death was, in fact, canon.
- Killed Offscreen: It's implied in the Golden Ending that Antonio (and likely other members of the College of Azoth) died. Not that it's shown on-screen.
- Kimono Is Traditional: A painting found in one of the Hidden Dead Ends depicts a woman wearing a red one. She’s actually Ume from the creator’s previous game, I Cannot Drown.
- Lack of Empathy: Nobody at the College of Azoth seems to care about Antonio and his students killing his homunculus over and over again.
- Little Dead Riding Hood: The 1.1 update added an unlockable Little Red Riding Hood costume for Lily. She can still very much die while wearing it, and you earn it by getting eaten by a monster in the forest that serves as a stand-in for The Big Bad Wolf.
- Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: She doesn't know it at first, but Lily is a rather young example of one as her father is performing alchemical experiments with the rest of his students. The original (and older) Lily is an even better example.
- The Many Deaths of You: A core part of the gameplay is unlocking all the different ways Lily can die traversing down the well.
- Mature Work, Child Protagonists: Player character Lily says she's 9 years old (and she's technically even younger, considering she keeps dying and waking up in new bodies), and the game is definitely not for kids; it heavily involves The Many Deaths of You (most of which are quite gruesome), Body Horror, and disturbing imagery, and a rather dark plotline about parental abuse.
- Monstrous Humanoid: The flesh monsters have many humanoid features, but are clearly anything but.
- Multiple Endings: There are many Dead Ends, a handful of Hidden Endings, and one True Ending. Notably, the True Ending reveals that all of these "endings" are all canon, as every time Lily dies, she is resurrected in a new body and left to start all over again.
- Rope Ending 1 - Lily starts climbing down the well, but the rope is cut by one of the students from the College. Lily falls to her death.
- Rope Ending 2 - Lily realizes the rope is too short, but the moisture from the rain causes her to slip and fall to her death.
- Rope Ending 3 - Lily finds a lamp on the wall right where her rope ends. She reaches for it to try and see further down the well, but loses her grip on the rope and falls to her death.
- Rope Ending 4 - Lily gets to the end of her rope and climbs into a nearby pipe. At the end of the pipe is an opening to Lake Champlain. While Lily looks out onto the water, a wave of water pushes her out of the pipe. She lands on the rocky shore head-first, mutilating her face and killing her.
- Rope Ending 5 - Lily finds a window in the well that she climbs into. Inside is a room that looks just like her own bedroom. Her Papa walks in and puts Lily into the bed, telling her that everything was just a dream. As Lily falls asleep, Papa smothers her with a pillow, killing her.
- Rope Ending 6 - Lily jumps off the rope to explore a room surrounded by windows. After discovering a corpse with the remains of her hair color, the well's cover is put back on, leaving Lily alone in complete darkness. Either she starves to death in the pile of other skeletonized Lily corpses, or eventually jumps or stumbles to her death.
- Rope Ending 7 - Lily gets to the end of the rope and tries to climb down the vines growing alongside the well's wall. The vines are actually a blood-sucking vine mentioned in a book that can be read in the house, which promptly trap and kill Lily.
- Rope Ending 8 - Lily finds a vent without a cover and climbs into it. She eventually falls through a weak point, getting injured from the fall and landing in a room full of deformed clones of herself. They turn to Lily and are implied to eat her.
- Rope Ending 9 - Lily almost makes it to the bottom, but makes the decision to look for more rope outside of the well to be safe. The rope is cut before she can leave, though, breaking her legs. She is left calling for help with the same dialogue from the introduction cutscene, implying that Lily actually heard herself crying for help to kick off the game.
- Rope Ending 10 - Lily makes it to the bottom of the well and discovers that it leads to the College of Azoth. There she encounters Papa, who reveals that Lily is a cloned homunculus. Papa believes that each Lily clone has the same "soul", and by repeatedly murdering her every time she disobeys an order, she will subconsciously learn to obey him without question, but without any of the mental trauma from an Abusive Dad. Lily is then shot in the head so the next Lily body can be tested.
- Rope Ending 10 (Again) - Ending 10 changes slightly when attempted again. Instead of the reveal that Lily is a clone, Papa is instead waiting for you at the doors leading to his lab and simply shoots you in the head again.
- Hidden Ending (Bad Craftsmanship) - By using poor quality materials like the unknitted yarn, Lily's rope breaks shortly after she begins climbing, falling to her death.
- Hidden Ending (Vehicular Manslaughter) - Lily gets run over by a car after walking into the street.
- Hidden Ending (Don't Feed the Wildlife) - If Lily feeds the monster enough jerky, the bag she is taking jerky from will run out (a hint that every Lily is a subsequent clone). By then, the monster is so reliant on her for food, it will eat her if she approaches without any.
- Hidden Ending (Mother) - By accessing the vent in ending 8 and jamming the garden shears into the fan, Lily finds a painting of Ume within a hidden room. It starts making her feel sick and makes the game start to bug out. Her fate is left unknown; however, given that the game states it loads Rope Ending 8 and you get that ending's phone number, it's possible she's eaten by the monsters.
- Hidden Ending (Ma) - By repeatedly entering and exiting the pantry, it will turn into a ladder leading to the attic. While climbing it, the game will repeatedly throw error warnings showing dialogue of Lily's mother yelling at Antonio (Papa), begging him to stop the obsessive cult forming around Azoth and Ume. This fails, and the original Lily is then seen to find her mother's corpse, swinging from the rafters after hanging herself. The game then freezes.
- Hidden Ending (Stupid Idiot) - Lily has the option to throw away items in the garbage can. Apparently this is expected and sometimes happens; some of the Lily clones are defective and decide to throw rope away rather than use it to climb down the well. As a result, Papa presses a button and causes the trash can to eat Lily, killing her so a more suitable clone can be tested.
- Hidden Ending (Modern Day Ophelia) - If Lily tries to wade through the river without adding stones to reach an item, the river's currents will take her away and eventually drown her.
- True Ending - Lily calls the phone number of the original Lily, who is still alive and has made her own life away from her father long ago. She immediately drives over to pick the cloned Lily up, and the two burn the house down, preventing the experiments there from continuing, as well as being implied to burn down the College as well by dumping fuel down the well. Both Lilies then go to a diner and eat pancakes.
- Nightmare Face: The flesh monsters have terrifying faces.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The monsters found in the vent ending catch most players off-guard. It's not revealed what they do to Lily, but given every other ending except the True Ending ends in her death, it's obvious what the implication is.
- Oh, Crap!: In a couple of endings, Lily makes a horrified expression before she dies.
- Offing the Offspring: In several endings, Antonio murders Lily, his nine-year-old daughter.
- Omega Ending: The True Ending is only available after getting all ten Dead Ends and inputing the full phone number from the digits you get after each ending. Downplayed as you do not have to get the Hidden Endings or Joke Ending.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: The true ending has the house (and the college of Azoth by extension) burned down by the Original Lily and the clone who contacted her.
- People Jars: New homunculus bodies for Lily can be found growing inside them at the bottom of the well.
- Point of No Return: Once Lily goes down the well, there's no climbing back up.
- Random Event: The pantry event, car ending, whispers event, and footsteps event are based on random chance.
- Replacement Goldfish: Lily is a homunculus made to replace the original Lily after she moved out and cut contact with her abusive father.
- The Stinger: After the credits in the true ending, Lily is shown enjoying pancakes at a diner with the original Lily.
- String Theory: There's a wallboard in the college meeting room covered in photos and notes, connected with red string. The notes include the people's ages, blood types, and how risky it would be to abduct them.
- Stupidity Is the Only Option: The entire premise of the game is to climb into a well with makeshift rope as a child after hearing a voice come from it. Subverted with the true ending requiring players to call for help.
- Surreal Horror: While a lot of the imagery is disturbing, the story is slowly revealed through clues.
- Tears of Fear: A couple of times, the titular Lily cries out of fear.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: Lily finally gets a happy ending in the Omega Ending after a list of endings where she dies every time which is taken up to eleven considering that she remembers every time she died. Also, no more homunculi of her will be created and killed.
- Til Murder Do Us Part: One of the secrets reveals that Antonio killed his own wife.
- Too Dumb to Live: Lily to an extent, due to her willingness to climb down a deep and dark well with rope materials that can possibly contain dubious materials, such as toilet paper.
- Ungrateful Bastard: You can feed the creature in the woods with beef jerky. It thanks Lily by eventually eating her.
- Virtual Paper Doll: Finding certain endings can unlock multiple outfits for Lily to wear. They only affect her overworld sprite and the pause menu, not the cutscenes.
- Vorpal Pillow: The five pieces of rope ending has Lily smothered to death with a pillow in her sleep by Antonio.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: According to the official trailer, the game occurs in 2005. And the intro states Lily is nine-years-old. Although a birthday card states her birthday is July 20th, 1985. Then subverted, as it's revealed in the true ending that there is an original Lily who's older and said birthdate is heavily implied to be hers instead.
