Puddle

Independently made games have always made an up an important part of the videogame industry. In a world of a few set styles of games, "indie" games are usually the ones that break the plane in video game design and often spark new game types in the process and let's not forget that all of the major developers out there were probably a little independent gaming company at some time or another.

The "indie" game in question here is Puddle, a student-made game available on the Xbox Live Arcade. Developed by Neko Entertainment and published by Konami, Puddle was the winner of the 2010 Game Developers Conference Independent Game Festival Student Showcase Division.

Puddle is a physics-based puzzle game that has you tilting the game world to guide your group of water or other liquid through the levels to the finish kind of like those tilting games that are very poplar for the tilt-sensitive iPod Touch. On the way there are obstacles like hot surfaces that cause your water to evaporate, lasers that cause some liquids to catch fire and plants that suck up and consume your "puddle" to name a few.

Over the course of the game your little cluster of liquid journeys through multiple stages that starts with making its way through the plumbing of a house, then the various dangers of the outdoors, onto a laboratory desk, etc, etc. Each stage presents a new host of obstacles to avoid with your puddle.

As well as changing stages, your very own puddle changes form as the game progresses as well, going from simple water, to a green, natural, chlorophyll-like substance and then onto highly flammable and unstable liquids like fuel and nitro-glycerine. Don't get your fuel to close to heat or it'll all burn away on you and don't shake up your nitro or else you'll have a whole different issue all together.

The look of the game has "indie" written all over it. The graphics aren't going to win any awards and aren't breathtaking by any means but hey just seem to work. Working with a lot of silhouettes, blacked out figures and foggy, out-of-focus backgrounds, Puddle has that indie-game "x-factor" in its look. It doesn't deliver with amazingly realistic visuals but with interesting artwork.

Just as interesting as the visuals is the music. Using the kind of music you'd expect to find in one of those nature flicks on coral reefs. While new age and odd, the music does go perfectly wth the whole feel of the game when playing.

The game play takes simple to a whole new level. There are two controls, the triggers, which are your tools to tilt the game world. Hit the right trigger to tilt the game world down to the right and the left trigger to tilt down to the left. Through tilting the screen, you have to get the liquid through the level and if you lose too much liquid along the way or in some levels go too slowly, you'll fail the level and have to start from the beginning. This simple game play works very well but it's in playing the game that its flaws seem to surface, the biggest being difficulty.

Now I get the fact that puzzle games are meant to be challenging but most provide a bit of an easy intro to let you get the hang of it before throwing you into the tougher puzzles but Puddle gives you the tough stuff as early as the second and third level. Even in the earliest stages of the game, only the utmost precision will allow you to finish the level, and that's usually with just over the required amount of liquid required to finish, let alone having a blow-out level. Part of the issue comes in when keeping your liquid together. In the game, when drops of liquid leave the screen, you have a few seconds to bring them back or else they are "discarded" if you will and you can't get them back. This would make sense if it were a bit easier to keep the liquid together. Unfortunately however, even in the simplest of levels, the liquid breaks into multiple little pools seemingly out of nowhere and you end up losing a large percentage of the stuff you're trying to get to the end of the level, sometimes before you even hit an obstacle.

Then comes the task of restarting a level, which you will have to do many times. Unlike in most games where you hit the "restart" option in the menu and it instantly reverts you back to the beginning of the level, in Puddle, you have to sit through another load screen as the level loads again. This makes restarting time-consuming, an most of all frustrating not to mention the load time are lengthy to begin with.

Overall the game isn't all bad though. For those who are patient enough or fans of this style of game, Puddle will keep them happy as they pass their little puddles through the vast obstacle course that occupies the game and let's not forget this was a game originally developed by students for a school project. So for the Indie game fan or alternative puzzle gamer, Puddle is great. If you're looking to just get into the world of indie and alternative puzzle games, Puddle is not the game to kick off with.