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P Ilomilo (Xbox 360)

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There’s no denying that we’ve already got a stellar lineup of big-name releases to look forward to next year, but I’m afraid that Naughty Dog, Epic Games, BioWare and the like may want to pack it up and call it a day. The race for 2011’s game of the year has clearly already been won, and it has been won by a little XBLA title called Ilomilo. I’m only slightly exaggerating. Ilomilo can already safely claim the prize for 2011’s cutest game, pulling visual influences from every single one of the most adorable titles you’ve ever played, as if the Kirby universe were given LittleBigPlanet-style plush treatment, made even more colorful (somehow), and then framed with quirky loading screen quips that may as well have been written by the Sign Painter. (In fact, the goo towers seen swaying in the background of one of Ilomilo’s bonus levels make me alarmingly suspicious of this.) Even the game’s very setup is cavity-inducingly sweet: it’s about two best friends who want to go on a picnic together, and your goal is to reunite them! And when you do, they perform a happy little dance! Awwww. Yet, in a brilliant turn of events, Ilomilo is also one of the most deviously designed puzzle games in years. Its adorable aesthetic practically makes you embarrassed to call it difficult, yet it’s hard to imagine any hardened gamer not being reduced to a frustrated wreck at least once before completing Ilomilo. That, in reality, is the game’s genius – not simply that it presents you with such a challenge, but that it stares you down with googly-eyed fuzzyfelt and dares you to man up. What an emasculating experience it is. Players alternatively take control of both Ilo and Milo, guiding them through cartoonish mazes constructed entirely of cubic blocks and positioning the two side-by-side to complete levels. It’s simple in theory, though of course all good puzzlers are simple in theory. Ilomilo’s extra layer is that its two protagonists are able to stand erect on any side of any cube, and can freely move from one gravity plane to another when prompted by red carpets. This leads to some crazy Inception-style shifts in perspective as the camera flips and pivots in order to keep your character upright in the center of the screen. Gravity, as one character says, was always a boring law anyway. You can’t even begin to imagine the depth this one mechanic adds to the game’s design. I don’t want to describe too many of Ilomilo’s specific challenges, largely because I don’t want to spoil the surprises for you, and partly because many of them are too visually complex to accurately recreate in words, anyway. Here’s an example, though: One of the first obstacles Ilomilo throws at you is a monster who hides inside of blocks and pops out like a jack-in-the-box to obstruct your path should you stumble in front of him. There doesn’t seem to be any way past him, until you realize that the monster can only emerge from one side of his cube at any given time, meaning he can’t block your path if he’s already obstructing someone else. You can see where this is going. Ilomilo is full of situations like that, and as with the best puzzlers to emerge over the last few years (I’m thinking specifically of Portal and World of Goo), it presents us with a completely alien concept that can only be overcome once we fully understand the game’s twisted (yet sensible) logic. Once you accept the fact that Ilo and Milo could potentially be standing upright on any side of any block, that one character’s perception of “up” could mean something complete different to the other, all rules pertaining to the real world (particularly when it comes to navigating intricately designed mazes) are thrown out of the window. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Ilomilo does for puzzle games what Super Mario Galaxy did for platformers. Ilomilo’s basic mechanic is to rearrange movable blocks in such ways that make the level navigable, and the mazes are often so meticulously crafted that nothing gimmicky would be necessary to make them challenging, yet the possibilities presented by the game’s mind-bending shifts in gravity are perfectly realized. Ilo and Milo are frequently standing at perpendicular angles, and one of Southend Interactive’s favorite tricks is to have both characters standing on different sides of the same block, with no clear way for one to enter the other’s gravity plane. It’s aggravating in a satisfying way. Ilomilo doesn’t officially release until January 4, 2011, but someone figured out that if you download a trial code from this site, it’s possible to then unlock the full game for 800 Microsoft points. It’s tough to say whether this is simply a mistake or a sneak preview for attentive gamers, but either way, the leaderboards are already rustling and Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. I have yet to explore all of Ilomilo’s features (or, for that matter, complete its story mode), but whether you want the game immediately or are holding off until its official launch, I have no trouble giving it my highest recommendation. Plenty of full-priced games could drop to ten bucks and still not be as worthy of the entrance fee as Ilomilo is. By the way, there’s an achievement in Ilomilo for using the d-pad to navigate through the main menu options to the tune of the title theme. Now look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t want this game.

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