Princess of the Water Lilies Review
While I don’t tend to read press releases when a shiny new game hits my inbox – “pictures are worth a thousand words” says the guy who writes for a hobby – I went back to read over the marketing spiel for Princess of the Water Lilies. Nowhere did it deign to prepare me for what this game was about to throw at me. One minute I was getting to grips with traversal, learning some basic mechanics and establishing the framework for puzzle progress. Just as I was mentally writing the game off as beautiful but a little lifeless, things took a turn for the dramatic. With no warning whatsoever I was suddenly getting rekd by a fireball spraying mecha camel. Okay, game, you’ve got my attention.
Things went from “casual puzzle platformer” to “getting my proverbial absolutely wrecked by a mecha camel” with surprising speed
I imagine an early planning meeting for Princess of the Water Lilies came down to two conflicting game types. “Should we make a puzzle platformer or a frenetic bullet hell?” ventured someone, laying the cards on the proverbial table. “Yes,” joked a developer, sitting towards the back of the room and trying to look attentive while busily wrangling build tooling. The result- a game that does both with surprising competence and manages to look wonderful while doing so.
You don’t need me to tell you that Princess of the Water Lilies is a beautifully hand-drawn masterpiece of visual design, though, you can see the screenshots for yourself. What you might want to know is that this soft, classical animation styled veneer conceals a fiendishly difficult, wonderfully bizarre handful of boss fights. Not your typical puzzle platformer boss interludes, either, but frenetic, claustrophobic and punishing struggles against a screen full of flying bullets, swiping limbs, falling washing machines and oh god so many bubbles.
The relaxed pace of the platforming puzzle sections and the intense boss fights juxtapose sharply into a game that feels very oddly paced, and brutally unfair at times. But Princess of the Water Lilies is so keen to go to increasingly strange and artfully devious lengths to make their bosses interesting that you’ll – like me – probably forgive the tonal whiplash just to see what’s next.
You won’t know until you play it, but things are about to get real dicy
Princess of the Water Lilies took me a little over four hours to complete, albeit I’m nowhere near 100%, and it feels like at least half of this comprised repeated attempts at the bosses. The other half was a slowly ramping up mix of environmental puzzles, presenting some interesting mechanical ideas and some familiar ones wrapped up in a new coat of paint. You’ll jump through portals, trigger moving platforms, move bouncy mushrooms by meowing at them, launch yourself out of hedges like a true fur missile, and battle against wind and water currents. Much of this is tried and tested in the likes of Ori, Rayman, heck, even Ecco The Dolphin or Duke Nukem and I seldom had any significant trouble with puzzles. That said I think at least one I solved by squeezing through a passage that ran over the top of it. Another I managed to box myself into an unwinnable situation and realise there’s no “reload area” button.
Well I didn’t solve the puzzle but I did get hilariously stuck
In fact there are no areas. Princess of the Water Lilies’ puzzles are gated by locked cages you need to unlock to pass, or hungry animals you need to feed and the conceit is always to find an item – a key or some food – and get it where it needs to go. Progressing past the cage (or hungry animal) moves you seamlessly into the next area and you’re always free to backtrack and explore for secrets once you’ve cleared a puzzle. Despite this each puzzle area is relatively self contained and it’s always clear what you need to do. The puzzles loosely fit with the area you’re currently exploring and you can expect to find breezy mountain tops, caves, underwater passages and more. Since Princess of the Water Lilies is mostly a puzzle game there’s very little tricky traversal involved- you seldom need to execute a precise set of jumps, and you’ll almost never gain any sort of momentum. The platforming is generally a little clunky and it doesn’t control nearly as tightly as Ori, nor with any of the finesse. Nonetheless you will need some well-timed movement to make it through some puzzles and the controls are good enough to see you through that.
Windmills and dandelions
The boss battles are… well honestly the first two were frustrating and largely uninteresting, feeling a little unfair at times and not really building upon the classic puzzle platformer “boss chases you through an area” trope. The three bosses toward the latter half of the game, though, managed to each be more interesting, more compelling and – of course – more difficult as they progressed. By the penultimate fight the game really hits its stride, and the final boss was absolute unfiltered lunacy. I thoroughly enjoyed these sections, even if I was dying constantly, failing to weave my way through a screen full of projectiles.
Princess of the Water Lilies is curious. It’s not a long game, the puzzles aren’t hard and you can throw yourself at the boss fights until you beat them with no consequences or setbacks, but it’s got a few interesting moments to share and holds together well enough to be enjoyable. The game keeps the pace moving, guiding you from area to area with levels that loop back through a dynamic central region as new paths open up. If you’re keen on getting every collectable then each level has completion stats and can be fast-travelled to. There’s also plenty to look at while you explore, with the hand-painted graphical style being endearing, though a little static and lifeless in places.
The jarring combination of relatively laid back puzzle platforming and absolutely frantic boss battles might not be for everyone, but if it sounds interesting- give it a look or a wishlist on Steam!