Ittle Dew

I played this game a long, long while ago already, and now I decided to replay it, to see if it will live up to my memories of it. It did, so here's a review.

Let's get over the potential cons first, because some of these can be dealbreakers for a lot of people.
- This is a puzzle game, first and foremost. Don't expect a lot of action or fighting and whatnot, there are very few exceptions. And it is a block-pushing puzzle game specifically, so if you find those tedious and boring you probably shouldn't buy it. Don't come into this expecting something similar to the original The Legend of Zelda games. It was inspired by them, sure, but it's clearly different in a lot of ways. It's closer to Sokoban than Zelda, really.
- It's short, with its sequel being longer while costing the same. 2-5 hours to fully complete a savefile, 15~ hours to get all achievements.
- Tank controls on anything other than keyboard. Both setting up a gamepad's controls and using it is tedious, from what I heard.
- There are some bugs. Not exactly game breaking ones, but there are some. For example, this game hates being opened in windowed mode on my PC, with everything but UI becoming black screens.

Now the pros!
+ The artstyle is charming. The characters are just adorable and are very memorable, and the game looks so lively and full of personality.
+ The humour is pretty funny. The deadpan jokes and overall mood will probably crack you up at least once. A little edgy at times, too, thanks to Tippsie being an alcoholic avid potion enthusiast and enemies from the Swamp... existing. Oh, and almost every character has a pun in their name.
+ Very clever puzzles and versatile tools which compensate for the few items the game has. Some rooms really make you think outside the box.
+ The music doesn't distract from the thinking, and is pretty catchy. The Castle and That Cold Place themes are ones that I especially liked, they play in my head from time to time.
+ Somewhat nonlinear. You only need two of the three items to finish the game, though getting all of the collectibles and hearts, and clearing optional content (Compost Crypt and The Master Cave) still requires all three of the tools.
+ Secrets! Ranging from simple optional shortcuts to... something else! That's up to you to find, though, isn't it? :P

I may be a little biased, since I played this game a long time ago already, but I'd say the pros outweigh the cons by a lot. A good 7/10 in my book.

I will start out by saying, this is a puzzle game. There is combat, but it more a break from the puzzles than anything else. With that being said, this is a very well designed and quite challenging puzzle game. It is short, but the game being beatable with any two of the three abilities provides an impressive amount of replayability

This game ended up being mostly puzzles, some of which were actually very difficult to solve on my own. I was honestly hoping the combat would have been more fleshed out. This will not scratch the itch you might have if you played the older Legend of Zelda games.

very playable and I enjoyed this game

In this game, you fight like a girl, a slightly overweight girl. Your flying foxy friend doesn't help much, as expected. Be warned that the bosses are hard to beat. Visuals are very realist, if you are a cartoon. The music is nice, and sound effects are good. The plot and art are full of humor. One can see developers put a lot of love in this game, the kind of love that expects money in return. The game is great, but the full price is quite expensive, wait for a sale.

Ittle Dew (a joke misspelling of the phrase "It will do") is yet another game that didn't turn out the way I thought it would.

From its presentation it looks like a cheap Zelda knockoff, possibly with some outdated 4th wall breaking internet humor, but it's not.

To figure out if you'll enjoy this game you can ask yourself this simple question:

What do I think about block sliding puzzles?

• a) Love 'em
  
• b) Okay I guess
  
[*]c) They should be classified as medieval torture devices

If your answer is b or c, I don't think you'll like this game very much. It's like 95% sokoban.
Otherwise, get it. If you're still not convinced, read on.

Structure

There's one main dungeon: the castle. It's a large interconnected area with lots of puzzles. While maneuvering your way through the castle you'll find chests full of gold coins (in increments of a hundred). Using these you can buy items from the shopkeeper outside. After buying an item and doing a small dungeon to get it, you may use it in the castle.

There are 3 items in the game: the Flame Sword, the Portal Wand and the Ice Wand. Using these you can delve further into the castle and eventually reach the final boss and find the Artifact, the main goal of the game.

The most interesting thing about this is that while the game expects a casual player to get all three items, the game is fully beatable with any two items. How you navigate the castle and approach the puzzles change drastically if you limit yourself to only two of them, and the game is short enough that this is easily worth the two replays to solve the other paths.

I liked almost all my time spent with this game. The exception follows below.

The Master Cave

The Master Cave is an optional location that you can only tackle with all three items. It's a gauntlet consisting of 12 back-to-back puzzles, which are some of the hardest the game has to offer.

The reason I didn't like it is that I feel like my trust was betrayed somewhat. That sounds dramatic, so let me explain.

When you play a puzzle game, it's like you develop a relationship with the puzzle designer. Through the puzzles you solve, your image of what kind of puzzles this person designs becomes clearer, and you get a sense of what you can expect from them.

Puzzles have two parts to them: Figuring them out, and executing the solution. The ideal puzzle in my opinion is where figuring them out is hard, but the execution is trivial. This can of course vary within reason.

The simple fact is that the Master Cave features a rather sharp turn in design philosophy to one I'm not a fan of, namely placing too much emphasis on execution. Nothing in this game requires the speed and dexterity that the Master Cave does. While I did solve it, and it could be argued that it's the Master Cave after all (the dev has gone on record saying "it's the master cave, sorry not sorry" (paraphrased)), I did not find it enjoyable at all, because once that trust had been broken, I kept asking myself "is it one of those puzzles, or is it a good one" throughout the rest of the Master Cave.

It's in my humble onion a blemish on an otherwise solid puzzle game. Rest assured that the rest of the game is really good.

Afterword

This game has been sitting in my backlog for years, and it was really on a whim I decided to play it.

Even if you decide to not get this game, at least take this review as an example of why you should check out the games in your backlog.

I know you have one. You have good games in it, and you should play them.

It's a Zelda game that's basically all Sokoban puzzles and does a lot to respect your time. The last boss fight kinda sucks but the rest of the game is good enough to where I think its few faults don't really matter at all. Give it a try. You'll have it done quickly but it's quality.

she ittle on my dew til i

I can clealy remember two games where I was stuck on puzzle I couldn't figure only to find the solution later, thinking about it while I wasn't playing the game. The first is Alundra and the second is Ittle Dew.

There's fewer terms that have a stranger legacy than Zelda-like, most of the time it seems to mean top down view and nothing much more. What defined most Zelda games though was a how specific it was about closed-off and self sufficient dungeons. But at the start of the last decade linear games started to fall out of grace, both open world and intricate interconnected imposed themselves as the new norm, to the point where even when this game mostly adhere to the later type of design you'll still find some people complaining about having to push blocks on switches to open doors. Because everyone like Zelda, just not THAT Zelda. And Ittle Dew is the game that is THAT Zelda.

While a good portion of games turns away from dungeon design, even when nostalgia about completly outdated game genre is still common and well recieved, Ittle Dew doubles down on it discarding everything else. Exit verdoyant overworld and illustrous quests, hello beating up random people and stealing their lunch money. Most of the game is compromised of one single castle with the extra gimmick that it can be explored in a numerous of way. Better understanding of the game weird rules allow to open alternative way to new corners of the castle and sometime even new ingenious ways to open doors to rooms you have already visited, if it isn't what adventure is about then what is it ?

The comitement this game have to "solve this sokoban puzzle to open the door" is probably unmatched, even more than ten years later. And there's something I love about it is how it's open ended design just allow to kinda wander in the castle doing whatever you manage to solve allowing you to probably finish it at some point. This game puzzle are for sure on the harder side but the hardest ones are also completly optional and often signaled as being optional. I currently have all the achievement for this game and there's a room in I just never really solved because by the time I got familiar with the trick to access it, I had already found a (pretty disguting) way arround it. It's common for games now to boast about "you can do everything in any order", but few ones actually nailed it as well as this one.

I sincerly think Ittle Dew have little serious competious in the very specific interests it appeal too and yet it goes in lengh to do it right.
And I'm not saying that just because one of the achivement told me I was smart while no teacher ever did.