Remember a few years back, when Sony released LocoRoco for the PlayStation Portable? It was an interesting take on the platforming genre as we knew it. Instead of actually controlling the characters on-screen, you guided them around by moving the stage itself, tilting it left and right and letting their momentum do the work for you. It was a novel idea, and it worked for both the original and its sequel. And I’m willing to bet it also inspired Neko Entertainment to try something similar with its puzzle game Puddle, a game that became a darling at the 2010 Independent Games Festival. Konami, seeing the potential in the project, opted to pick it up, and this past week, released it as a downloadable game for Xbox Live Arcade. So, is it a game that deserves a showering of applause, or is it all wet? Well, a little bit of both actually. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here’s how the game works.
Rather than control a character who’s taken liquid form (we keep thinking of that terrible Genesis game The Ooze – and YUCK), you instead control general forms of water throughout various stages. One has you stuck in a coffee cup, only to escape and start to seep your way through the network of pipes below; another has you controlling liquid alloy, working through a complex lab and eventually making a difference against its security system. There’s no silly plot line here, just an interesting set of journeys, with clearly marked exits and obstacles to overcome along the way. And we don’t just mean spinning wheels or waterfalls to go down. Nope, you’re actually facing a huge amount of danger throughout Puddle. Right from the start, you’ll see what perils await, including huge flames that can actually dry you out quickly if you sit on them too long (or idiotically run into them firsthand, like we did our first time through) and fans that can disperse you simply by running into them. Other obstacles have to be overcome or solved as well, including switches that require a degree of water to hit them in order to switch them on.
Some are easily within reach, simply by rolling your puddle back and forth; others require you roll off a wall and then tilt the level just right so it splashes onto the switch. This sort of level design is quite ingenious, but the problem is, some of the later ones actually require you to be some sort of physicist or college graduate to get them fully figured out. There are times that the puzzles are too problematic for their own good, requiring you to hit a switch and then run back barely in the knick of time, or risk getting cut off and losing the required amount of volume needed to pass the exit. This is bound to frustrate those who go in thinking this is some kind of cakewalk, even though there are a few “skip” options you can choose if a level becomes too infuriating. Which it will and that’s too bad, because Neko Entertainment has the liquid portion of the game just right. The water effects are outstanding, and it reacts just as it would in real life, splashing around, sliding down tubes and reforming when you have a chance to gather it together, reforming one big glob.
This featured review concludes on the next page, please click Page 2 below to read more of our final impressions of Puddle for Xbox Live Arcade.
