This is the game that did me in. When I was a child, sealed puzzle games with a little metal ball you had to manipulate through a puzzle were quite the rage. Ophelea is of an age with me and knew this. Dewy's Adventure is exactly that puzzle game with fun colorful graphics that will appeal to young children. It is the life of a pure drop of dew, and your mission is to wash and clean the world, freeing your friends along the way and rescuing them from the evil Don Hedron and his nasty minions, Black Water.
Charlie ran through a scenario and then handed the Wii-mote to me. I held it in both hands. I tilted it to slide Dewy around, shook it side to side to produce earthquakes and up and down to get wind. As you maneuver around the world in this first scenario, help tips come on screen to show you what you could do. You control the temperature. If you heat the world up, Dewy became gaseous - a good way to avoid many enemies as they cannot grasp you in your gaseous form, however you only move up and down - which is a good thing! Once you rise high into the air, you can AE blast your enemies with lightning.
I enjoyed lowering the temperature.
"You'll find it more slippery and harder to control," Charlie said.
But I enjoyed it. Dewy turned into a hard little ice cube - well, he was shaped like a diamond - and became a little hard destructive force as he now had a spinning attack. With the world now a sheet of ice, Dewy also moved much faster when I tilted his world. I also found "bouncers" like you would in a pin-ball game; bouncing Dewy faster meant his attacks were more forceful, smashing through his enemies easily. To which Charlie commented, "You're good at this!" once he figured out what I was doing.
What a marvelous little game. This game is rated 7+, but I can just see a 5-year-old tilting and shaking that controller, even if he or she cannot quite manage the finesse of changing the temperature with the toggle and making use of Dewy's special attacks in those forms.
The former head of developer relations for the Stratics Network, Carolyn Koh has years of experience covering the MMORPG genre. Carolyn first started playing games such as Pong & Moon Buggy on the 8086, and arcade games like Ms. PacMan, Centipede, Red Baron and Joust before graduating to text muds through University computers and Doom on the LAN in the Engineering department after office hours. She claims she didn't frag the guys. Carolyn enjoys reviewing casual games and children's games for us. She also maintains a staff blog commenting on the emails crossing her desk that touch on the gaming industry in one form or another.
