Ittle Dew

The Good
* Ittle is a girl who eats hearts off the ground.

• Badass dialogue. Very memorable and fourth-wall shattering -- The characters know that they are in a video game, and make fun of the supposed "storyline" in other video games. It's genuinely funny.

• Heart containers to collect (12 pieces in total). Any Metroid and Zelda fans will love to do this. I know I do. I watch that heart meter grow like it's my own child growing up.

Note: They're not actually called "heart containers". I use this term so that Zelda fans will understand.

• Multiple solutions to puzzles. I can remember at least one chest that I couldn't open at first, and later was able to, using a different method.

• Ideal game to play in small doses. Beat a few rooms at a time. The way that the blocks and teleportation work in this game, you will feel tired after 5 to 10 rooms, and that means it's time to save and quit, and come back tomorrow.

• Metroidvania-style dungeon, except it's viewed from the top-down perspective. You will, for example, find doors that can only be opened from the other side, find shortcuts that lead back to an early room, and enter a room with four doors but only be able to open two, with the other two doors containing optional sidequests. The gameplay is considerably non-linear, and you can choose which area to explore next, at your own pace. The map clearly shows all the possible places to explore.

• Four weapons with a lot of different uses. I like how their uses continue to evolve and be discovered late into the game.

• The main campaign is not too hard to play through. If you can beat Portal 2 all on your own, you should be able to beat this. The sidequests can be insanely difficult but most of them are not too hard either. The difficulty setting is acceptable (but if you only play the main campaign, you're missing out on a lot; this will be discussed later).

• No danger of losing any progress. You can die, but your death doesn't change ANYTHING. You will just respawn in the same room with full health (which means that the quickest way to replenish your health is to die). The only progress you lose is the things you have done in that room, which is usually nothing.
  
  The Bad
  * About the controls. First of all, the Windows version doesn't support gamepads. I find that hard to believe, since the game appears to use the classic SNES button layout -- sorry, that's just for show. You have no choice but to play this on the keyboard.

The default setting: Arrow keys, Z,X,A,S (four weapons), M (Map screen), T (Tip screen). One of the buttons is incorrectly configured upon installation, and you have to manually configure it. (I can only say WTF?!)

• Other than the heart containers, you also collect trading cards. This seems to only unlock an achievement. I didn't bother to collect these. And these cards aren't even the same as the ones in Card City Nights (another game from this developer), which make them even more pointless.

Remember in Metroid games, the stuff you collect is actually useful to you in combat? Sorry, doesn't work that way here.

• Enemies don't drop coins. They only drop hearts. But you don't really lose any hearts in the first place, if you don't fight any enemies. Because of this, I ask myself over and over, during the course of the game -- why do I fight this enemy? What's the point?

• Expect very little action going on in this game. The most effective way to kill a monster (and the only way to kill him from a distance) is to teleport him. That's right. You're not firing any guns or arrows. Teleport.

• Also, there are enemies that you COULD kill, but actually need to keep alive to help solve the puzzles. I really don't like this design. If there's an enemy then you kill him. Period. Don't use him for other purposes.

• It should be noted that the puzzles in Ittle Dew frequently need to be Reset. You make one wrong move, then it's over and you have to reset the room (there's a menu option for that). I find this to be slightly annoying. I remember that in Portal 2, you almost never need to reset anything. As long as you're not dead, the puzzle will be solvable, no matter what you may have done.

• The room design can be really bloated sometimes. There are things that are useless or unrelated to the puzzle. I find these to be distracting.

• The most annoying thing about Ittle Dew.

So you got COINS to collect. In a puzzle game. Full of puzzles in each room. Any halfway decent game designer should be able to figure out the obvious -- use coins to purchase clues! (Or just give me clues via some other means. I don't care. I just want the clues to be an option in case I get stuck.)

However, Ittle Dew fails to adopt this system, so when you're stuck (or just too impatient to solve a certain puzzle) you're going to need to read a walkthrough. It's quite annoying.

But hey. Braid also didn't have any clues. So what do I know?

• Some of the puzzles rely too much on reflex (i.e. how fast you can operate your keyboard). In one room, I already figured out the solution, but couldn't press the keys fast enough, and there was no way to know whether it was the correct solution. But it was the correct solution. My point is that the game is punishing players for not pressing their keys fast enough, rather than not solving the actual puzzle.

• Solving the puzzles isn't that much of a satisfaction, other than the fact that you can SAY you solved it all by yourself. It's merely a solution, you either figured it out or you haven't, and that's all that there is to it. Chances are that right after clearing a room and upon entering the next room, you will already have forgotten what the previous puzzle was. The more difficult puzzles aren't very memorable either. If you release this game with puzzles only -- no dialogue, exploration and heart containers-collecting, it will be a complete unplayable mess.

• Because this game doesn't offer clues, its DIFFICULTY becomes questionable. You can tell that the developer loved the old Zelda and Metroid adventures and all the sequence breaking and speedrunning that came with them. But those techniques were for experts. Ittle Dew's developer somehow believes that the average player should also find joy in them, since they added these ridiculous achievements, such as:

Complete the game without harming any Frog, Fox, Berry, or Deer Jennys. (Pacifist run)

Complete the game in less than 15 minutes. (Speed run)

Complete the game with only Portal wand and Ice wand. (Sequence breaking)

I think that these kinds of achievements are completely useless to the average player because very few people are crazy or determined enough to attempt them. Ittle Dew is essentially a game designed with sequence breaking and advanced shortcuts/techniques in mind. That might be the reason why certain puzzles are insanely and intentionally difficult -- you're not supposed to solve it, not unless you're sequence breaking. As it turns out, it's not friendly towards casual players and its difficulty more often than not becomes an annoyance. Only the truly determined and intelligent gamers will be able to understand why the levels are designed this way, and find the full potential of this game.

The Bottom Line
Collect heart containers. If you feel something in your heart just by looking at those three words, pick up this game and give it a try.