Genre: Action/Adventure
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami
Release Date: 2007

I say this because I’m hoping to get quoted in Dewy’s Adventure’s ad campaign: this game is goddamned adorable.

Shingo Mukaitoge, the producer of Elebits, is returning to the Wii for the game that’s presently known as Dewy’s Adventure. It, like Kororinpa: Marble Mania, is the kind of title that’s already coming to seem somehow emblematic of the Wii: it pairs colorful, kid-friendly graphics (the phrase Mukaitoge used was “warm and inviting”) with intuitive controls, creating a game that may actually be fun for the whole family.

At the beginning of Dewy’s Adventure, Don Hedron attacks the forest with putrid Black Water, contaminating it and endangering the Elder Tree. With the last bit of its strength before being overcome, the Elder Tree creates a small droplet of water. This droplet, Dewy, is tasked with purifying the forest and overcoming Don Hedron.

As Dewy is a drop of water, this lends itself to a number of interesting and – dare I even say it – innovative gameplay options. You don’t move Dewy around the environment. Instead, you move the environment itself, sliding Dewy around by tilting the Wii Remote left and right. You can also shake the controller to create gusts of wind, earthquakes, or lightning bolts, knocking out enemies or solving puzzles.

By tilting the Wii Remote forward or backward, you can also change the ambient temperature within the game world. At high temperatures, Dewy evaporates and becomes a puff of steam, making him difficult to injure. At low temperatures, Dewy freezes solid, allowing him to do some damage in combat. At the same time, though, Dewy becomes more difficult to control in either form, forcing the player to choose his form carefully.

Dewy’s Adventure is still fairly early in its development cycle, to the extent where its title may change before all is said and done. It wasn’t playable at Konami Gamers’ Day, but the screens and design documents they showed have a lot of promise, particularly in Elebits’s wake.

Mukaitoge promised that the final version of Dewy’s Adventure will feature an Edit Mode, allowing players to create their own levels and share them with friends over the Wii network. There’s also unnamed content for WiiConnect 24 in the works, although nothing was said about what form that might take.

This is not the game that’s going to convince the “lol Nintendo is for kids” crowd that they’re wrong, but Dewy’s Adventure has an interesting concept and is coming from a proven developer. It’s not coming anytime soon, so the Wii drought will last a little longer, but it’s supposed to be in American stores by the end of the year.