Ittle Dew (Patreon)

The strongest feelings I had for Ittle Dew were in how it auto-saves. The game freezes when you change rooms so it can save. Most games have the decency to let you keep playing while it saves in the background, but this one locks everything in place like its about to crash every time it saves. And good feelings or bad feelings, that's as emotionally invested as I got in Ittle Dew. It's a lot of block puzzles. Like, the vast vast majority of the game is just pushing or sliding standard block or ice block puzzles. Even the final boss is primarily a series of puzzles around sliding blocks!

Outside of the tedium of solving the block puzzles, It's not very difficult but they do occasionally require leaps of logic. In one room, you have to light a bomb on fire, then turn it to ice, move the frozen bomb, and then when it unfreezes, the fire is still going and the bomb explodes at its new location. Why the fire doesn't do out when you encase the bomb in ice, doesn't really make sense. In the final boss, they toss a new mechanic at you where you can freeze a portal, move it, and then interact with it while still frozen. Everything else in the game functions differently when frozen, but you're just supposed to know that frozen portals act like normal portals without the slightest of in-world teaching. Ittle Dew feels like the kind of game I would post on this site. Some charming writing, some funny pictures, and the occasional underlying neat idea, but there's a reason my games are free. The controls aren't totally smooth and can be a bit dodgy at times, it's short, and it generally needs some work. It's not awful but unless you get it on sale, it's not worth the asking price. It regularly goes for $15 but I picked it up for $5 and that was still kind of pushing it. You can beat it in a single sitting and the game itself jokes that it's at best a 3 out of 5, and that's probably being generous. I don't begrudge people from making money off of their work, but this one REALLY comes down to a value judgement for the player. Is an hour and a half of puzzles about sliding blocks worth $15 to you?