When a guy's urine kills a rat, the rodent's gooey green guts drip into the sewer. Why you'd want to keep this mess from getting torched is anyone's guess.Spill coffee in real life, and you've got a mess. Upend a cup in Puddle, and a simple adventure in fluid dynamics begins. As your trigger fingers tilt the world left and right, gravity and momentum coax liquids through perilous obstacle courses. Cross each finish line quickly and with enough fluid left, and you’ll earn a medal and unlock the next two-dimensional track.
Shepherding liquids through the likes of laboratory tubes and dirt tunnels is subdued fun at first, thanks largely to simple controls and the differing properties of each fluid. Water curls into short-lived waves, petroleum ignites easily (avoid hot surfaces!), and even tiny droplets of nitroglycerine detonate with a bang. You’ll swish off ramps to reach pressure-sensitive switches, dodge hungry Venus Flytraps, and even escape the regurgitation reflexes of human digestion.
Regrettably, Puddle's enticing possibilities are mired in a swamp of irritating issues. Increasingly lethal obstacles take the place of actual puzzles, and overcoming them requires painful trial and error. Meanwhile, the camera frequently focuses on runaway specks even as most of your goop starts to dissolve once it's off-screen. Heck, on a couple of levels, your sludge seems to lurch about of its own volition no matter what you do. By the time you reach the later sewer stages, where one wrong twitch gets you puréed by circular saws, you'll be happy to leave Puddle in its muddy depths.
PUBLISHER: Konami Digital Entertainment • DEVELOPER: Neko Entertainment • ESRB: Teen • MULTIPLAYER: None • ACHIEVEMENTS: Grueling • COST: 800 Microsoft Points ($10)
+ Simple controls; interesting range of fluids; themed environments with varied obstacles.
– Few actual puzzles; plenty of contrived instant-death forced restarts.
– Hopelessly arbitrary camera that you can't override; questionable physics on some levels.
? Did we really need to see a dude pee on a rat?
