Attractive price aside, it's unfortunate that Nintendo took the most unique Wii game it's published in nearly a year and effectively hid it where most Wii owners are bound never to find it.
Fluidity
For: Wii (via Wii Shop Channel)
From: Curve Studios/Nintendo
Rating: Everyone (comic mischief)
Price: $US12
Fluidity's concept is simple: You star as a small body of water tasked with purging a magical book of an ink-fuelled infection.
The control scheme - tilt the Wii remote to tilt the levels (which resemble pages from a book) and dictate the flow of water - is similarly straightforward.
But Fluidity's handling of that water is at once predictable and delightfully frantic: like a real body of water, it's fragile, dynamic and extremely prone to splitting into smaller bodies and droplets that, if left too small for too long, will evaporate.
As you might guess, losing all the water means losing a life.
But keeping the water together is more than a survival tactic, thanks to the game's wonderful level and puzzle design.
Fluidity doesn't resemble a Super Mario or Kirby game in any visual respect, but it displays the same level of invention, relentlessly creating new obstacles, gadgets and scenarios to put that straightforward premise, control scheme and physics to continuous, brilliant use.
Though things get a little excessively difficult towards the end, the game mostly toes a perfect line in terms of difficulty: the main challenges are tricky but fair, while a tonne of optional challenges are perfectly skippable, but mentally and physically gratifying to complete at your own pace.
