Dewy’s Adventure is exactly the kind of game that’s tailor-made to be attractive the Wii’s large casual audience. Its premise is simple: defeat the Big Bad, rescue your pals, save the day. The look is cheerful without being sugary, as charming as a sunbeam on a delightful spring afternoon. The controls are easy to learn and take excellent advantage of the Wii’s motion sensitivity, making the game ideal for kids or newer players. As far as accessible games go, Dewy scores off the charts. Too bad it isn’t that much fun.
You play as Dewy, a tiny drop of water sent by the Tree of Seven Colors to save the world from the evil Don Hedron and his nefarious Black Water. Dewy must recover the tree’s six magical fruits and rescue his friends the Eau, who have been trapped by Don Hedron and spend most of the game whimpering as they await salvation. It says much about the game’s presentation that the characters manage to retain their charm despite being stuck in such a hoary scenario as the Small Plucky Hero vs The Big Bad Megalomaniac, but you’ll find that you actually rather like Dewy his pals.
If you were to list all of the game’s best and worst features, the control scheme would, bizarrely enough, end up in both groups. You don’t move Dewy, you move the world beneath him, tilting it side to side, forward or back to send Dewy sliding in the desired direction. Holding the Wii Remote sideways, you’ll tip it in the direction you want the landscape to move, almost completely ignoring the D-pad and only using the buttons to make Dewy jump or attack. To rescue Dewy’s friends, you merely need to slide into them, and even the most complicated maneuvers require little more than a tilt of the Remote and a well-timed button press. This simplified control makes the game extremely easy for anyone to pick up and play, as the relationship between what you’re doing with the Remote and what you see on the screen is immediately obvious and easy to grasp.
The slip-sliding control can make precision moves maddeningly difficult, however, and poor Dewy will go sailing over the edge of the landscape more than once because of a poorly executed jump or a misjudged distance. The mechanic of moving the ground, not the character also leaves you feeling oddly detached from the action, as you can only exert so much influence on what’s going on. As charming as little Dewy is, he’s little more than the marble you use to navigate one of those wooden Labyrinth puzzles. The levels of Dewy are basically just big mazes, and there’s a distinct disconnect between the cerebral desire to solve the navigational puzzles and the emotional motivation to rescue those poor, mewling Eaus.
Though the game’s emphasis is on puzzle solving, it throws in a wee bit of combat thrown in for variety. Dewy, it seems, has studied up on his chemistry, and learned that if he heats up he’ll turn to mist, and if he cools off he’ll freeze into ice. While in mist form, Dewy floats safely above the ground and can deal out powerful bolts of lightning, while the icy Dewy can freeze his surroundings and dish out slashing attacks. Though most enemies will fall from a quick jolt of electricity or a smack with the ice form, tougher baddies require a combination of attacks, including Dewy’s water-form hip smack. The combat is never too difficult or overwhelming, which sadly means it’s also never terribly interesting.
Switching between Dewy’s forms is also useful for solving puzzles. Water Dewy will…drown, I guess…in a lake, but Ice Dewy can freeze it and skate right on by. Swapping forms is as easy as pushing up or down on the D-pad and adds a pleasant wrinkle to the rather basic stripped-down platforming gameplay.
Dewy’s Adventure is too simple for experienced gamers, placing far more emphasis on its “hey, neato!” motion sensitive controls than on actual gameplay. Kids and casual gamers will undoubtedly find Dewy and the storybook-like landscapes through which he travels captivating and charming, but might become frustrated by the boss fights or moves that require a bit more precision, like certain jumps. Despite all of that, I can’t help but feel an odd sort of affection for the game, which is awfully likeable in spite of its flaws.
