Game details Developer: Daniel Benmergui

Publisher: Daniel Benmergui

Platform: Windows, Mac

Release Date: August 1, 2017

ESRB Rating: E

Price: $9/£6

Links: Official website | Steam Daniel Benmergui: Daniel Benmergui: Windows, MacAugust 1, 2017: $9/£6

I was already in love with the new video game Fidel: Dungeon Rescue before I realized I had missed one of its most important buttons. What greater compliment can you pay a video game? Fidel is so good that I was hooked even when I didn't entirely understand it.

One month into my time with the game, I'm still not an expert. Fidel is among the hardest puzzle games I've ever played, but I keep coming back, groveling like a... you know. Fidel has everything I want in a brain-busting puzzle experience: quick sessions, a carefully balanced level generator, satisfying payoffs for intelligence, decisions full of stakes, and a dedicated "bark" button. (No, that's not the button I was talking about.)

Man’s best friend













Fidel leads players into its puzzles with zero formal instructions. Instead, each session starts with a small "you can't fail this" challenge, followed by a suite of randomly generated puzzle rooms. After a few of these "quick lesson, quick death" instances, the game's basics become clear. You're a dog, and you must eat your way through dangerous dungeons to find and save your elderly owner.

This plays out in top-down, 2D puzzle rooms, and Fidel cannot cross over any steps on his way to each room's exit. (Because you'd trip over your own leash, you silly mutt!) The game supports a simple rewind for your steps, which is necessary because the path you take matters. Fidel must consume the dungeon's creatures in order to gain experience points (XP), but many of the things you eat will drop your health (shown as Zelda-like hearts). In good news, levels are full of health kits, and coins can be spent on things like health boosts and weapons, so you'll constantly spend and refill your health.

Your challenge is to find the right path that lets you gobble up as many XP-granting foes as possible while picking up crucial health packs and coins. XP is essential, by the way, because it increases your puppy's maximum health level (and any level-up moment refills your entire health bar). You'll have to play a few sessions before you come to appreciate how much those health bar expansions make or break your progress.

The first thing I loved about Fidel is that nearly none of its levels can be beaten perfectly. The random-level algorithm powering Fidel starts by making players bend their brains just to find "good" paths, but once you approach that kind of mastery, you will realize: Fidel rarely lays out a neat, "this is the only obvious path" kind of room. This design decision forces players to make tough choices, and these are key, as your pup constantly prepares for challenges to come. Maybe you try to scrape by with more health and less XP in one room; maybe you sacrifice more health in the next in order to grab a few extra coins.

That extra button doesn’t make things easier

No item or XP gained in a single Fidel run carries over to the next game—except, of course, knowledge. I got a significant taste of this once I figured out how to switch my starting point in every puzzle room.

Fidel intentionally holds this information back for a certain amount of time. You will land in a puzzle room, see an exit on the other side, and start mapping out a good path through enemies, health packs, and coins. This focuses your attention on certain tactics—like the turtle who won't hurt you if you eat it from behind or the "boss" spiders that become harmless if three smaller spiders nearby are eaten in succession—and the fact that you can't always route a perfect path to eat some of Fidel's higher-XP creatures.

Eventually, after dozens of deaths, I started a game with a seemingly impossible mini-challenge. I would die if I approached a scene from the left, I noticed. I furrowed my brow. I tapped some buttons. Lo and behold, my sweet pup reappeared on the other side of the level. My original exit had become my entrance, and vice versa.

Whoa holy jeeps. Fidel just doubled in size and scope. Now, I had the additional high-level question and challenge of picking my entrances and my exits in every puzzle room. I thought this might "help" me play better, but all it did was double my min-max mental workload in every puzzle room. Start from the left, and I'll take out more simple turtles. Start from the right, however, and maybe I'll pin down that incredibly tricky, item-destroying gnome.

In great news, Fidel offers a generous "try-and-rewind" system. Retrace any steps you've taken, and the game will undo any kills and restore any health lost. This reduces the agony you'll surely face when your seemingly great strategy runs you into a dead end (which happens often, since you can't walk back over. You can always try a brief test run in either direction—so long as you don't take any steps that completely kill you. If you do that, you have to rewind your death step, then try to beat the room as quickly as possible from your current position, because a game-ending ghost starts coming for you.

Witness-like?

At first blush, Fidel looks like one of fifty shmazillion randomly generated "roguelite" games that have flooded online stores as of late. I would counter that Fidel is instead a unique twist on another classic genre: the falling-piece puzzle game. Instead of wondering which of seven tetrads you're going to get, however, you must endure whichever enemies and arrangements Fidel serves up—and then you must be very careful in picking steps to solve or deal with them. And just like how Tetris will often dump a certain combination of pieces that simply won't fit together (damn you, Z block!), so will Fidel create not-quite-perfect levels on a regular basis.

The line puzzle system here clearly resembles The Witness, which makes sense, as Fidel creator Daniel Benmergui contributed to that 2016 puzzle sensation and was inspired in part by his work on it. But Fidel really is a distinct and different take on that style of play, and anyone put off by how The Witness presented its puzzle world may be delighted—even relieved—by the "get to the puzzle guts" presentation of Fidel. It's cute. It's quick. It's tough. And it's absolutely memorable. Should you be OK with its restriction to computers and its lack of multiplayer modes, you owe it to yourself to try this surprise summer delight.

Verdict: This is my favorite quick-burst, brain-busting puzzle game in years. Buy it.