BREAKING: ‘Fluidity’ fun despite utter lack of guns

Real Americans know not to touch Influence globs when they're on purple fire.

Creators of digitally distributed games have enjoyed a financially and creatively successful couple of months. One-man developer Markus “Notch” Persson has siphoned millions of euros from his growing army of MINECRAFT acolytes (I’m one of them), and the moody 2-D platformer LIMBO managed a healthy profit this summer on the Xbox Live Marketplace, which traditionally rewards guns and explosions over, well, art.

Downloadable games have thrived critically, too, besting their week-to-week retail competitors as often as not. When 2010’s meta-review scores shake out at the end of the year, distilled experiences like SUPER MEAT BOY and PAC-MAN CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION DX will rank among the most-loved.

It’s a shame, then, that the intuitive and incredibly fun FLUIDITY ($12, Wii) has gone practically ignored since its release early this month. At the time of this writing, the game has provoked just four professional reviews, according to online aggregator Metacritic, in addition to non-numerical write-ups on Kotaku and Destructoid. The abstract and ponderous (but totally worthwhile) ECHOCHROME II, meanwhile, has drawn twice as much attention since debuting Tuesday on the PlayStation Network.

The evidence is anecdotal, highly speculative and a bit apples-and-oranges, I know, but it’s about as scientific as this stuff gets. WiiWare exclusives simply don’t get the marketing push or coverage that downloadable standouts enjoy on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Nintendo is partly at fault, obviously, but the gaming press shares the blame.

That might seem like a lot of preamble for a $12 game, but even 10 minutes with Fluidity will sell you. It casts you as the reader of a talking book invaded by corrupting “Influence” — menacing purple blobs that have drained its pages’ magical qualities. It’s your job to destroy said blobs by drowning them in a puddle of vaguely sentient water, which you slosh about the book by tilting the Wiimote left and right.

This all sounds much more childish in concept than it is in execution, and the game’s appeal is difficult to appreciate until you get your hands on it. Fluidity is by turns a platformer, puzzle game, pinball game, scavenger hunt and rotator-cuff exercise device (you jump by thrusting the Wiimote skyward), and it defies easy categorization.

Even this morning, as York Dispatch editors met to plan the day’s paper, I was asked to describe “Fluidity” to see whether it merited front-page promotion, and the best I could muster was, “Uh, you’re a puddle of water.” A manager laughed me out of the meeting.

So, no. You aren’t keeping aliens at bay, you aren’t shooting Cold War communists, you aren’t assassinating corrupt Roman aristocrats, and you definitely aren’t saving the world. You’re getting a book kind of wet. And you’re doing it in one of my favorite games of the year.

The variety and value packed inside Fluidity are astonishing. You start your hunt for 89 rainbow drops — your measure of progress against the Influence — as a meandering, disorganized trickle, ebbing hither and thither for the game’s lowest-hanging fruit. You’ll gradually acquire skills that make you more ambulatory and, believe it or not, a bit scarier — as a block of ice, you can move quickly, freeze enemies and stick to walls; in your cloud form, you can float anywhere, throw lightning and rain on stuff.

Some of the more banal tasks repeat themselves a few times too many — you’ll reassemble several identical machines and return plenty of goldfish to fishbowls — but the means by which you do these things are wholly unique. At one point, you must rescue an especially imperiled fish, whose bubbly prison can be broken only while you’re in water form. But to return him (her?) to his (her?) fishbowl, you have to use a launchpad that can be activated only in ice form. The solution? Freeze the fish into a block of ice, get out of dodge and melt down next to the fishbowl.

(Pro tip: Fish are hardy creatures.)

You’ll do all of this with a commendably simple two-button control scheme, though the game’s reliance on real-life motion does get frustrating. From the get-go, Fluidity demands some incredibly precise jumps, whether you’re hopping rooftops or leaping between windmill blades. Mapping such an important mechanic to a gesture (the aforementioned upward thrust) can make some potentially exciting jumping puzzles a total chore.

The level progression becomes aimless at moments, too. Even in early stages, several rainbow drops are sealed off until you acquire late-game skills, but the game lets you know this only sporadically. At times, Fluidity is as much about figuring out where to go as it is about determining how to get there. That can’t be intentional.

But those are just about the only complaints I can level against this sparkling experience. Fluidity is some of the most fun I’ve had on the Wii this year.

(And if you’re late on your holiday shopping, know that downloadable titles never run out.)

This article originally appeared in the York Dispatch on Thursday, Dec. 23.