Review: Ittle Dew 2
Ittle Dew 2 (2016) is an indie game clearly inspired by the 2D Legend of Zelda games. Frustrating combat holds it back from greatness. I loved the art and many of the puzzles, though.
Puzzles
Most of the puzzles were fun and felt fair. A few puzzles felt like they required you to discover techniques that were completely not obvious, or tehcnically hard to pull off. I think accidentally performed a glitch to solve one of the puzzles (pushing a triangular block straight instead of diagonally).
I’m pretty sure I had to solve a puzzle using an advanced magic wand technique that wasn’t demosntrated to me in the game and I only discoverd by accident while mashing buttons.
Theoretically you can do the first seven dungeons in any order, but I was happy to take the game’s suggestion on which dungeon order to use. I also skipped all 5 optional dungeons, because they immediately felt extremely obtuse and timing-heavy in each of their first rooms, and I had already soured on the game a bit by the time I unlocked them.
Combat
About halfway through the game I noticed there was a menu option to reduce combat difficulty. I still found the game pretty challenging even after enabling that. While the game doesn’t punish you especially badly for combat failure (respawn at the dungeon entrance, but dungeons are pretty small), you do still have to redo the entire fight you lost.
Also, it’s possible and quite easy to accidentally walk out a door mid-combat and reset an entire fight when it’s not a boss. This was really frustrating.
The combat centers around two main things: your extremely weak stick/sword and a dodge roll with invincibility frames (“iframes”). Enemies have a lot of health. Some required more sword hits than I could bother counting. Many enemies in the later half of the game spew large quantities of projectiles, and can crowd the screen in such large numbers that I had no hope of dodging or even understanding what was going on.
Technically the magic rod lets you reflect projectiles, but I found the aiming to be quite difficult in the game and routinely missed, taking more damage than if I had tried to dodge.
Writing
The game is almost painfully self-aware. Mostly it made me chuckle rather than groan. It definitely feels like a game from 2016 with this writing style, to me.
Overall
I seem to remember liking the first game (2013) more than this one. I preferred the hand drawn 2D art style to the cel-shaded 3D (though I think it’s quite good for what it is).
It’s a fairly effective 2D Zelda-like, held back by frustrating combat. Perhaps someone with a better knack for its combat could really like it. It also seems well suited to speed running, including an in-game timer and many different possible dungeon orders.