Pros: Creative, unique gameplay, solid gesture controls.
Cons: Can be frustrating, gesture controls wear out the arm.
In the Tao Te Ching it is said that, “Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water, yet nothing can better overcome the hard and strong.” For those who prefer their religious teachings to come in video game form, this same lesson can be learned by playing Fluidity, an imaginative Wiiware puzzle platformer that proves just how powerful water can be.
The Basics: Do Everything With Water But Drink It
In Fluidity, players are asked to help a story book rid itself of “The Influence,” represented by blobs of black goo on its pages. To get rid of the goo, players must collect rainbow-colored drops of water. These drops are in various panels on the pages of the book, often in inaccessible places.
To reach these drops, you use water. You have a pool of water that slides around when you tilt the remote or can be made to slosh upward with a thrust. It’s an ingenious control scheme perfect for the Wii.. You roll water through ducts and over platforms, and you use it to power water wheels, transport rubber duckies to bathtubs and douse dangerous creatures blocking your way.
Throughout the game players acquire more ways to manipulate water. You can freeze it into an ice block used to break brick walls or heat it into a steam cloud that can float to high places. Water can be gathered into ball then exploded or shot up like a geyser, ice blocks can freeze themselves to walls or pendulums, clouds can gust wind or shoot lightening.
Puzzles sometimes require an ability you haven’t attained yet. I have spent a half hour trying to solve a puzzle and discovering it wasn’t possible with the tools I had. Other times I succeeded in getting a rainbow drop then discovered it would have been much easier if I had just waited. I would have preferred it if the game kept you out of puzzles you couldn’t solve yet.
The Difficulty: Harder and Harder
Fluidity contains four chapters, each containing six pages with each page containing multiple panels that represent levels. These panels contain rainbow drops, and the puzzle is getting to each drop. You might have to find a way to use a mechanism to release a cog and carry it to a machine. Sometimes you must maneuver an ice block by jumping from one pendulum to the next over a sea of lava. Puzzles get increasingly convoluted as the game progresses. At times the number of steps necessary to reach a rainbow drop is almost beyond measure, leading to some very wearying puzzles.
As you move around the water you invariably lose some liquid. You can lose drops when it sloshes from one place to another or lands on a flaming monster that evaporates it. Ice can be chipped away by crushing machines. You can also gain water by grabbing drops scattered about, with excess water going into backup containers. If you run out of water you can get a refill from your reserves, although most or all of the progress you have made on the current puzzle is lost. The most elaborate puzzle in each chapter involves saving an imprisoned rainbow drop. There are checkpoints in these puzzles, so you don’t have to restart every time you lose your water, but if your reserves are all empty it’s game over.
The Controls: Well Done But Tiring
Fluidity is tough on your brain, with some really tricky puzzles, but it is also tough on your body. There are a lot of places where you need to make water or ice blocks jump, and the constant thrusting motion takes its toll. I agree with the design decision to use motion gesture for jumping (although the controls are not always as responsive or accurate as I would have liked), but it does make it hard to play the game for too long at a stretch.
Besides hunting rainbow drops, players can locate hidden puzzle pieces to unlock mini-games, such as an entertaining one in which you must make an ice block travel as far as possible before inevitably plunging into the lava below.
The Verdict: A Solid Puzzle Platformer
I didn’t finish every puzzle in Fluidity. Some because I couldn’t solve them (either because I’m not smart enough or because there’s some other skill I never found) and some because they were so intricate that once I had gone through a half hour puzzle and failed to finish it I had no interest in trying again. This is what happened in the last of the puzzles involving retrieving imprisoned rainbow drops; after going in with full reserves of water and slowly losing it all, finally getting the game over notice with no idea how far I was from success, I just gave up. Soft and yielding water may be able to overcome every obstacle, but unlike water, I know when it’s time to throw in the towel.
