Game Reviews

Ittle Dew

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| Ittle Dew
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Ittle Dew
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| Ittle Dew

With Ittle Dew, Ludosity wears its heart and its influences proudly on its cartoon sleeve.

It's a block-pushing, torch-lighting top-down dungeon-crawler in which you are rewarded for exploration and in which the game's secrets are slowly revealed.

Ittle Dew also represents a cheeky nostalgic nod to the past. One in which Ludosity isn't afraid to tear into the games that have inspired it, or the genres that it apes here.

It's not without its niggles - chief among which is a control system that is sometimes more frustrating than functional - but there's enough fun to satisfy most.

Dew praise

The game begins with you catapulted onto a distant island wherein lies adventure, sarcasm, and crazed axe-hurling flowerpot ladies who want nothing more than to hack your life bar down to zero.

From there, Ittle Dew resembles a pleasantly Zelda-esque experience. There are dungeons around the island. In each of them, you'll find a new toy. The first one, for example, is a flaming sword that enables you to set light to torches with a slash.

These new tools, which you're technically buying from a dodgy bloke in a junk shop, act as the key components in the puzzles you need to solve to escape the various dungeons.

Once you've grabbed the portal wand, for instance, you can move objects quickly and use the summoning block to press switches.

The game is brilliantly designed in this respect. And while Ludosity doesn't quite match the ingenuity of the games from which it's so obviously borrowing large parts of its structure here, it's still a joy to work out how to bypass certain previously impassable obstacles.

Dew for an award

While both of the control schemes on offer are a little inadequate, the D-pad option is certainly robust enough.

There's a reset button in the pause menu, too, while leaving a room results in blocks being dropped back into their original positions.

It's in the scraps that Ittle Dew creaks the most, though. The controls aren't fluid enough for you to dodge oncoming blows. Sometimes, you'll find yourself wafting a weapon at thin air when you thought you were dealing damage.

But that's a minor black mark against what is an otherwise first-rate experience. It's tightly paced, well thought out, and possesses more than enough nostalgic charm.

Ittle Dew

A clever and well-put together-homage, Ittle Dew is let down slightly by some control issues, but it's still an entertainingly retro romp
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.