Ittle Dew 2

Most Zelda-likes are cover bands. They learn the chord progression — heart containers, a boomerang, a dungeon with a big key — and play it back with a new coat of paint and a sincere face. Ittle Dew 2+ is not doing that. It knows the songs too well to play them straight, and it spends its entire runtime poking at the seams of a formula it clearly loves.

The studio is Ludosity, a small Swedish outfit with a strange and useful résumé: the original Ittle Dew, the cult platform-fighter Slap City, and co-development duties on Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. That fighting-game background matters more than it sounds like it should. It shows up in the readable hitboxes, the snappy input response, and a general refusal to let animation get in the way of intent.

The setup is deliberately stupid, and that’s the point. Ittle and Tippsie — an adventuress and her perpetually drunk floating fairy — wreck their raft on an island and decide the fix is grand theft. Eight raft pieces. Seven dungeons. A beach, a prairie, an insufferable art exhibit, and some guy’s basement. Nobody in this game is a hero. Ittle is a thief with a sword, and the writing never once pretends otherwise.

Positioning-wise, this sits in the same shelf space as Blossom Tales, Death’s Door, and Tunic — but it’s older than most of them and considerably weirder. Its Steam standing is Very Positive, a small but consistent sample that says exactly what you’d expect: people who bounce off it bounce off the combat, and people who love it love the puzzles.

One piece of housekeeping that shapes any buying decision: the game was delisted from PS4 and Xbox in 2019 after a publisher dispute with Nicalis. Steam and Nintendo Switch — where Ludosity self-publishes the + edition — are the only live storefronts.

• Seven dungeons, no prescribed order: The main campaign’s dungeons are genuinely order-agnostic. Not “technically possible if you’re a speedrunner” — designed for it and tuned for it.
• Four weapons that are all puzzle tools: Every combat item doubles as a traversal or logic verb. You don’t get a sword and then a puzzle item. Each tool is both, always.
• Duplicate-based upgrades: Weapon upgrades come from finding second and third copies of the same weapon scattered around the world. Exploration feeds power directly, with no shop tax.
• Secret Shards → Secret Dungeons: The overworld hides shards that unlock optional dungeons pitched at expert players. These are not victory laps. They are the actual final exam.
• The + package: A Dream World with five puzzle-focused dungeons, collectible cards, and a toggleable Easy Mode that reduces incoming damage — a difficulty valve rather than a separate campaign.

The Gameplay Loop

The core rhythm is old and reliable: wander the overworld, spot something you can’t reach, file it away, find the tool, come back. What’s changed is the friction between those beats. Ittle Dew 2 keeps the overworld dense — you’re rarely far from a bush that shouldn’t be there or a cliff edge that’s suspiciously walkable — and it pairs that density with a warp system that keeps backtracking from curdling. The result is a loop that stays hot. The dead air most Zelda-likes accumulate in their second act mostly doesn’t happen here.

The Four-Tool Grammar

This is where the design earns its reputation. Four weapons is a small vocabulary, and Ludosity treats it like a constraint to exploit rather than a limitation to apologize for. Every tool has a combat identity, a movement identity, and an interaction identity, and the dungeons are built by combining those layers rather than gating on them.

The consequence is a puzzle language that gets more expressive as you learn it, not more cluttered. Compare that to the standard Zelda structure, where the dungeon item is essentially a single-use key — you get the hookshot, the dungeon is about hookshots, you never think about it again. Here, a tool picked up in the opening hours is still generating new ideas deep into the endgame because the context around it keeps shifting. That’s the trick, and it’s a hard one to pull off.

Upgrading via duplicates is a quieter piece of good design that deserves credit. There’s no currency, no vendor, no menu economy. Finding a second copy of a weapon in a cave is the upgrade. It collapses two reward systems into one and removes an entire layer of interface between you and the thing you wanted.

Sequence Breaking as a Design Contract

Plenty of games tolerate sequence-breaking. This one shakes your hand for it.

The seven-dungeon structure isn’t a soft suggestion enforced by invisible walls — the game is architected so that clever tool use, tight movement, and lateral thinking are legitimate solutions, including to problems the designers presumably had a specific answer in mind for. That’s a real philosophical commitment, and it costs something. It means the difficulty curve can’t be tightly authored, because the designers don’t control your arrival order. It means some encounters land soft and others land hard depending on what you’re carrying.

Ludosity took that trade knowingly, and we think they were right to. The payoff is a specific and increasingly rare feeling: the sense that you outsmarted the game rather than completed it. Most modern adventure games have optimized that feeling out of existence in the name of a smooth onboarding curve. Getting it back is worth a bumpy difficulty line.

Where It Thins Out

Combat is the weak leg of the table. It’s arcade-clean — responsive, readable, with none of the input mush that plagues indie action games — but it’s shallow. Enemy variety is functional rather than inventive, and most encounters resolve into positioning plus a couple of swings. The fighting-game DNA gave this game excellent feel and mediocre depth. When the puzzle design is this inventive, the combat reads as filler by comparison, and the game is at its worst in the stretches where it asks you to fight instead of think.

The main campaign is also short — completable in a handful of sessions, depending on how thoroughly you comb the overworld. The story is thin — intentionally so, and the deadpan writing is funnier than most of what indie adventure games attempt — but there’s no emotional throughline to carry you past the credits. Nothing here is trying to make you feel anything except clever.

Which brings up the real structural quirk: the game hides its best material behind its optional content. The Secret Dungeons and the Dream World are where the puzzle design goes from “very good” to its hardest, most inventive work, and the difficulty spike between the main campaign and that content is a cliff, not a slope. Players who finish the seven dungeons and stop will walk away thinking this is a pleasant, funny, slightly slight little game — and will have missed a huge share of the actual design work. That’s a discovery problem, and it’s the single thing most worth changing.

The art is bright, flat, and cartoon-clean — bold color blocking, chunky character silhouettes, minimal texture noise. It’s a legibility-first aesthetic, and in a game where the puzzle answer is often “that specific tile looks marginally different,” legibility is a mechanical requirement, not a style choice.

It is not, however, especially distinctive. The look is competent and readable and a little generic; it won’t be what you remember. The humor carries the personality that the art direction doesn’t.

Technically it’s a low-risk proposition. The 3D-rendered top-down presentation targets modest hardware by design, and there’s nothing in the visual budget that should trouble a modern machine. The UI is appropriately unfussy — a compact HUD, a menu that doesn’t editorialize, and no tutorial layer nagging you through the first hour. Onboarding friction is close to zero, which is exactly right for a game whose opening statement is “go anywhere.”

Steam is the default recommendation. Keyboard-and-mouse works, but this is a controller game in its bones — the twin-stick-adjacent movement and the tool-swap cadence want a gamepad, and analog control makes the tighter movement-puzzle solutions substantially less painful. The Steam build also puts you closest to the community’s accumulated knowledge, which matters more than usual for a game with this much hidden content and this many valid non-obvious solutions.

Nintendo Switch is arguably the better fit. Ludosity self-publishes the + edition there, which means the Dream World and card content are baked in and supported by the people who made them. The dungeon-sized chunks of progress suit handheld sessions well, and the low-spec art style is built to hold up in portable mode.

One honest caveat: the Secret Dungeons demand precise, sustained execution, and Joy-Con sticks are not the ideal instrument for that. If you intend to actually finish the expert content, play docked with a Pro Controller.

And to state it plainly again — PS4 and Xbox owners are out of luck. The 2019 Nicalis delisting removed the game from those stores, and it hasn’t returned.

Ittle Dew 2+ is a puzzle game wearing an action game’s clothes, and it’s considerably better at the first job than the second. That imbalance is the whole review. The combat will not hold you; the dungeons mostly will.

What lifts it above the enormous pile of competent Zelda tributes is the design philosophy underneath — the decision to build a world where being clever is allowed, where the solution you improvised counts even if it wasn’t the intended one. That’s a hard thing to engineer and an easy thing to accidentally break, and Ludosity held the line on it across seven dungeons plus a set of optional ones that will humble you.

We recommend it to the right audience: puzzle-first players who can forgive thin combat and a short campaign. Then, when the credits roll and it feels a little slight — go find the Secret Shards. The game you thought you finished is the tutorial for the game you actually bought.