Puddle Review

People are really into liquid based puzzle games right now aren’t they? With the likes of WiiWare’s Flow and the more recent Mercury HG, viscous blob sliding sims are getting a fare amount of representation. Beginning life as a humble school project, Puddle later went on to win the 2010 Independent game festival, catching the keen eye of Konami in the process. A couple years later, this once small time project has become a full fledged downloadable title, adding a challenging and striking entry into this fairly obscure genre.

So, will Puddle wash us away with its indie charm, or will it evaporate without a trace? Find out in this Hot or Not!

HOT

Just kind of…flows.
Control in Puddle is not limited to the strings of liquid you have to shepherd through each level, but to the environment itself. Tilting the level using the triggers or the PS3 Sixaxis causes your liquid to slide, causing it to gain momentum, split up and have various properties. Such a simple concept right? Yet this conceptual simplicity means that once you’ve mastered these basics, the game really begins to get challenging. Players won’t have long to master the way your droplets move before you’re being asked to flick them nimbly past a plethora of obstacles and hazards.

The controls require a light touch and nudging the environment by minuscule degrees is the only way you will succeed. It’s certainly an unforgiving approach, but one that has its rewards. Such an indirect method of control leads to a sedate pace of play – one which lulls you into a gentle rhythm while you slowly slosh your liquid up ramps, over bumps and tumbling down passages.

The music is a subtle thing in Puddle, occasionally ramping up in intensity to provide something quite memorable, but otherwise lingering in the background with a unobtrusive ambience, allowing the visuals and gameplay to carry the majority of the engagement

Interesting and Varied Design
Puddle is visually striking, interesting, varied and very polished. You begin the game by spilling a coffee cup in a lab and from then on, its a pretty wild ride as you take indirect control of a variety of different kind of liquids. Again, such a simple concept actually allows itself the potential for a great amount of variety – one that Puddle isn’t afraid to capitalise on. For instance, the aforementioned coffee controls are fairly straightforward, but soon the game asks you to familiarise yourself with other substances with slightly different physics and properties.

Liquid fertiliser can be used to grow plants to help you progress, while Nitroglycerin is a volatile substance that you need to be gentle with or it will explode. ‘Rat Goo’ is thick and clings slightly to walls and in a mid-game section where you control the beating of a heart to pump a substance around a vein is a particularly nice twist on the core idea. This shows that the developer is really taking the initial concepts to all the places it possibly can. These different riffs on the core concept ensure that Puddle retains a good measure of its novelty well into its playtime.

Puddle certainly doesn’t lack variety and the differing kinds of liquid are mirrored in the games varied visual style.

Beginning with that bold, shadowy aesthetic that seems to have gained popularity recently among indie developers, Puddle then changes it up. The opening levels are all strikingly colourful, quite like the style of Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, but with a kitschy science lab backdrop. Things take a turn at Limbo as you watch your liquid tumble through someone’s body through the lens of an x-ray machine, and a later section is rendered like an intricate doodle on some graph paper. It all looks absolutely wonderful and you could get an entire game out of any one of these individual art styles. The way Puddle experiments so freely with these many styles are impressive.

NOT

Screwy Difficulty
I could only recommend Puddle to a certain kind of player due to its difficulty. Puddle is challenging at the best of times, but often it’ll overstep that mark and spike wildly. You have to reach the end of each level with at least a certain amount of liquid, although there’s a ton of obstacles that require some very precise control. Saw-blades, fire and heated pads are some of the things that will make an effort to ruin your day, additionally many of them will require a great amount of finesse to overcome unscathed.

Levels aren’t very long (most take between one and two minutes to complete) but early on they become very punishing. The art of manipulating your blobs over jumps and obstacles is a skill that takes a long time to truly master, so you’ll be restarting levels very often – an annoyance that’s exacerbated by some pretty long loading times.

There are a handful of level skips that the game gives you, called ‘whines’ and are represented by a sad, weeping face. The implication seems to be that if you find Puddle too hard, then you should simply stop whining. These level skips are useful but act only as a reluctant confession that the games difficulty curve is badly sketched. A way to ease the pain of this difficulty is welcomed, although in the end it’s no adequate substitute for plotting a sensible curve in the first place.

If you enjoy challenging games then you’ll find a lot to love with Puddle. The game certainly doesn’t hold your hand. It throws you into some very tricky situations fairly early on and doesn’t really let up. There are a few instances where the only way to avoid a certain obstacle is through trial and error, but it’s at these times that the game becomes most frustrating. It’s designed to thoroughly test you if you want to see the later levels, to the point where it really could have done with a tweak in difficulty. While this kind of challenge is very rewarding to master, when you’re spending the better part of an hour on one level, it can degrade into frustration quite quickly.

Call That a Level Editor?
A slim level editor called ‘The Laboratory’ seems like an attempt to give Puddle some extra, artificial play-time. True, Puddle isn’t an especially long game, but the sheer variety in its main portion, coupled with its strict challenge, means that it feels long enough. The Laboratory is a slimmed down, materialistic kind of editor. Liquid pours out from a tube at the top in a continuous stream and you’re allowed to place some of the games various geometry on the level. It can be kind of neat to make a twisted path for the liquid to travel, but it ultimately feels pointless. Additionally, you can’t share any of your creations, plus with mild tinkering all you can do is make a fleeting distraction. I’d have preferred to see a slim, but tight game rather than one with superficial fluff added seemingly just to tick a box.

Verdict

Puddle is damn hard, but Puddle is also good looking and pleasantly varied. It’s a game that will only render itself to the player who seeks a challenge, although one that will shrug off anyone attempting to play it in the wrong mindset. However, if you’ve got what it takes to master it, the game is also incredibly rewarding. The simplicity of the controls means that you really feel a sense of mastery upon completing some of the trickier levels, even if it was kind of frustrating at times. How well you do on Puddle ultimately rests on your capacity to deal with such challenge. For some it will be a beautifully rendered blast around some very unique and interesting gameplay ideas and for others it’ll come across as obtuse and overly punishing. Ultimately, Puddle gets a lot of mileage out of its simple concept and manages to deliver an incredibly slick while still polished experience that’s marred only by its uneven difficulty.

[Editor’s Note: Puddle was reviewed on the Xbox 360 hardware. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]