At first glance Ittle Dew looks like a clone of a Zelda game, more specifically A Link to the Past. Crashing upon an island, your raft in pieces, you decide to adventure around to find some way to get off of the island. Tippie is your partner and he’s an alcoholic fairy-fox that accompanies you throughout your journey to buy a raft from the pirate shop keeper, Itan. An enjoyable game enlaced with humour, fun weapons and puzzles that will give you a good few hours of gameplay.
Upon loading, the default keyboard controls are pretty awkward but you can change those in the boot config before you begin. It’s a little annoying if you don’t know how you want your keys set up beforehand as you cannot change them while the game is loaded, so you’ll have to close the game and reopen to be able to modify. There is controller support for those that prefer to use the device, which I ended up doing.
There is one only one difficulty setting and once completed there doesn’t seem to be a hard mode. Some of the puzzles are pretty straight forward, while others require a bit more brain power to work out, once you do you’ll be kicking yourself at the solutions that now seem so obvious. They aren’t amazingly original in how they work and the weapons you gain make some of them seem easy enough to not want to bother. If you do get stuck on how to fight a boss or an area in game, then Tippie will be able to give you the solution to the problem, though it doesn’t work in all areas of the game.
A nice selection of weapons are available: The Fire Sword, Ice Staff and a Portal Wand that you will need to explore your way through the game’s dungeons and mini-puzzles to collect trading cards. The fire sword lets you set things alight and melts ice, the ice staff allows you to freeze things and push them around, and the portal wand is pretty self explanatory, it lets you portal mobs and items to places where you place a portal brick which is pretty fun.
The art style is simple and cartoony, and it fits in well with the overall atmosphere of the game. Ittle Dew has a fitting colour palette with a mix between cheerful and colourful areas but blue-tinged dank dungeons. Fitting with the simplicity of the game is the music. There are no epic tracks in the background but a simplistic tune that fits well with the ambience of the levels. Trudging along through the over world has a nice upbeat tune, yet the dungeons are quiet enough for you to concentrate on the puzzles, but add in a nice touch.
Ittle Dew took me 2 hours and 45 minutes to complete the main campaign, which makes it a pretty short game. There are further things to do should you want to complete the Master Dungeon or collect all the trading cards, but they aren’t necessary for the story. To me there’s not much replayability due to the fact the game can get very tedious with the push-block puzzles all the time, but I would probably play through it again at a later date if I felt like a short puzzle game with a hint of adventure.
It’s a nice short game with some fun humour, making a nice little time waster for an evening or spread over a couple days. I’d recommend it to someone looking for something Zelda-esque that doesn’t want to spend a lot of time getting into a game.
