Too Long; Didn't Play: Puddle

Sponsored By: My daughter. Seriously. She saved her allowance so she could watch me play this.

Time played: About 2 hours

Trickle review

How does a game make you care about the fate of a blank Puddle of physics-based liquid with no dialog and no anthropomorphization?

Damned it I know, but Puddle pulled it off.

Geyser review

Let's mix things up this week by starting with a brief description of what Puddle is, because I'd wager most of you haven't heard of it. Puddle is a physics-based puzzle platformer in which you are tasked with getting most of a Puddle of some sort of fluid through a maze of obstacles designed to use up your Puddle, and the only control you exert over the world is the ability to tilt it 30 degrees to the left or right. It is essentially a gritty reboot of LocoRoco Cocorechho, which is a comparison what won't help you because nobody played that, either.

Physics-based games are usually terrible. They generally combine frustrating puzzle design with a seemingly arbitrary scoring system to create a game that is the opposite of fun. The popular ones know how to manipulate the old Skinner box to make players feel compelled to play the next puzzle in spite of this, and thus we have phenomenon that generates games like Angry Birds. It all holds together until you ask yourself whether you're actually having fun while you’re playing it – and you have to answer that you're not, but there isn't anything else to do while you're on the toilet, so you might as well keep playing.

Puddle could very easily have been one of those puzzle games. Indeed, it comes close at times, but it maintains a level of variety that I've seldom seen in the puzzle-platformer space. Just as soon as one sort of puzzle starts to wear out its welcome, the game introduces a whole new fluid with completely different physical properties and all new obstacles.

For example, you start with simple water that is directed by tilting the world with the triggers on the controller. Before long the water is turned into juice, where you must direct it through the human body to be absorbed, at which point the fluid enters the bloodstream.The bloodstream is directed by pumping the blood – by alternating between the two triggers to create differential pressure and direct the fluid. Still later you have to direct rocket fuel through zero gravity in a spaceship in orbit, but as the ship returns to Earth the tilt-based gravity controls are reversed as your Puddle of fuel falls upward.

Pro-tip: Holding the controller upside down helps immensely with that level.

On top of the variety in the mechanics, the game throws a plethora of visual styles at you: crystal-clear water, green slime, glowing lava, all manner of fluids rendered in different styles and different electromagnetic spectra.

My favorite is the one where you direct an ink spill through a mechanical drawing littered with old pencils, erasers and ink pots. It's a visually striking level in a game that's full of visually striking levels.

So we've established that the game is beautiful and clever. What's the catch?

The game is unforgiving as heck, which is almost as unforgiving as hell but not quite as hot about it. If your puddle runs too dry, even if you're within a hair’s breadth of the exit, you start over from the beginning of the level. Further, you can't see the entire level from the start. Expect to replay entire levels because something you thought was a ramp dumped your entire puddle into the fire. And if you get used to playing it cautiously so that your puddle doesn't disappear in a puff of steam, the game will throw a ramp that needs as much momentum as you can muster – of course if you don't know that by the time you see it, you can't get enough forward momentum to make the jump.

And don't get me started on the nitroglycerin levels. Good grief, you can fail that on in the first second of the level if you're not careful (sometimes even if you are).

Ironically, I'd feel better about the punishing difficulty if the game didn't offer a way to skip the levels. You're granted a limited number of tokens that allow you to bypass particularly tough stages. They're called “whines.” If you want to skip a level, you have to click a button that says “whine and skip.”

I fully realize it's irrational to care what a piece of software thinks, but those tokens will be consumed over my mouldering corpse. I'll be darned (again, it's like damned but cooler) if I'll give the game the satisfaction.

Keep dripping?

Occasionally punishing difficulty aside, I’ll probably be finishing this one. In the first place, I'm under contract. My daughter saved her allowance for weeks to see me play this for her, and I never skimp on a job.

In the second place, the game is just compelling enough that I'll forgive the preemptive insults. The puzzles are consistently interesting, and the cutscenes in between fluid types give some personality to what would otherwise be just another physics-based puzzle-platformer boasting about how cool its water looks. Anybody can slap a pair of googly eyes on something and call it a character. When a game can make you care about a reasonably realistic looking puddle of decomposing rat puss, though, that's an accomplishment.

Is it the Devil Daggers of gamified water slides?

I'm going to say "yes" on this one. Even though the puzzles are actually solvable, the game sets a tone of fetishized difficulty that I've come to associate with the Souls series and games like Devil Daggers. You'll find no help while in game, save for the aforementioned insult currency, so it's completely down to you, your tolerance for physics based puzzles, and your patience with trial and error gameplay.

Five out of five dripping daggers, which are presumably dripping blood that you can guide to some sort of receptacle at the end of a convoluted labyrinth.

Comments

Physics-based games are usually terrible.

I disagree, in general, but I really like puzzle games.

The Wii had a number of games like this for pretty obvious reasons. Dewy's Adventure is a deep cut your daughter might like, though I'm not sure if it holds up controls-wise since it was done before Motion Plus.

garion333 wrote:
Physics-based games are usually terrible.

I disagree, in general, but I really like puzzle games.

The Wii had a number of games like this for pretty obvious reasons. Dewy's Adventure is a deep cut your daughter might like, though I'm not sure if it holds up controls-wise since it was done before Motion Plus.

We've already beaten it, but we keep it around because my daughter likes to look at the enemies gallery, and my son likes to watch me beat the bosses.

The controls work fine for what they are. The bigger issue is often the camera, which will obscure where you're going to land after a jump and occasionally send you dropping off cliff.

Wow, I'm positively shocked you guys not only have that game, but have a history with it.

Fluidity is still the best of these types of games. I tried Puddle and found it finicky and less fun by comparison. Fluidity has the added benefit of being a Metroidvania, which is a tough act to pull off in a puzzle game.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Fluidity is still the best of these types of games. I tried Puddle and found it finicky and less fun by comparison. Fluidity has the added benefit of being a Metroidvania, which is a tough act to pull off in a puzzle game.

I am intrigued by your recommendation and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

garion333 wrote:

Wow, I'm positively shocked you guys not only have that game, but have a history with it.

One day eclecticism followed me home and I fed it, so now it won't leave.