Sept 28, 2007
Ever sipped from an innocuous mountain spring, only to find your guts afire hours later when the “refreshing purity” reveals its true bacterial payload? Like the Evian-to-be that had you hugging the porcelain that time in the Brecon Beacons, Dewy’s Adventure pledges refreshment, disguising a cruel backstabbing agenda within.
Backstabbing, you say? Okay, it’s a bit strong, but we must admit we’re disappointed. During the Wii’s wobbly training feet days, Elebits was the perfect crutch. Picking out just one of the Wii’s unique features - the pointer - Konami crafted a delightful, domestic rummaging game. It was short, sweet and, most importantly, was able to forget the old way of doing things, and fully embrace the alien experience that is Wii.
It’s just so “game-y.” Six worlds with four stages each, sub-bosses and a self-contained boss battle - we’d be forgiven for thinking we’d slipped into the mid-nineties. Back in the day we would have chided a game for having such sparse aspirations, but with so few titles falling back into this habit, Dewy makes it seem like the return of an old friend. Albeit one who was a bit of an asshole.
However, while Elebits’s concept existed to massage the ego of the Wii’s fledgling control scheme, Konami would seem to have developed Dewy from the opposite end - taking a concept and painfully grafting a control scheme on to it. They’ve gone down the tilty remote route - you tilt a horizontally-held remote as if tilting the level itself - but Dewy is very rarely a tilty game. If you look at Monkey Ball, Kororinpa or Mercury Meltdown Revolution, all three are primarily about the danger of over-tilt or imbalance and the main threat to you is the horror of, as Monkey Ball ominously puts it, “fall out.”
