Described as a “breakneck race” for survival, players must venture through the void, dashing and thrashing, fighting bosses. The controls are fast-paced, but you can sit back and chill out or try to earn a spot in the rankings by racking up combos. We’ll have to wait for more details and gameplay, but you can rest assured of a stellar soundtrack.

Thrasher is out in 2024 for consoles, PC and Meta Quest headsets. It supports haptics and spatial audio, seemingly confirming its launch for Xbox Series X/S and PS5. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.

Puddle has got a new patch.

The patch will fix:

• Demo flow has been updated to help new players get a feel for the novel game mechanic
• No more load times when restarting a level
• Updated Leaderboard display
• Minor tweaks throughout to make the game even more fun, interactive, and challenging
• Updated gameplay video included in the demo

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more news and updates.

As retail exclusives for the Xbox 360 crawl to an excruciating standstill, Xbox Live arcade, its pioneering digital storefront, has gotten a second life, as it busts at the seams with the sheer amount of breathtakingly high quality and creative content flooding its annals. XBLA has had a ton of must have games over the course of the past half decade, including veritable masterpieces like Shadow Complex, Limbo, Braid, and Super Meat Boy. Add one more to the list, as the excruciating but mesmerizing Puddle joins the fray, and ranks as easily one of the system’s best games.

As a concept, Puddle is easy enough, and once it’s laid out on the table, it might be hard to understand just why Puddle is as addictive a game as it is. Puddle is all about guiding various liquids through increasingly narrow and twisting paths to a prescribed destination. The liquids can vary from water, to coffee, to dangerous chemicals, to orange juice, the environments can be as varied as a chemical factory, a sink, the inside of a man’s body, and to the inside of a spaceship in zero gravity. Puddle almost always gives context to why you’re doing what you’re doing- so, for instance, when you’re tasked with controlling some highly toxic substance through the forest, you’re told you can’t touch the walls of your maze even as the turns get more treacherous and the corridors narrower. If you do, you’re going to kill all the plant life.

Puddle mixes it up not just with the substance you control (each of which controls differently, relative to its real life density and viscosity) and the environments, but also with the objectives, which aren’t always about guiding the substance home. One memorable instance will have you coordinating the pressure of a liquid, and you have to get it just right or you’ll fail the objective and be asked to restart again.

As a matter of fact, failing is something you’ll be doing a lot of. Puddle, you see, is hard- very, very hard. In spite of its deceptively simple control scheme- only the L and R buttons are used to control the flow of the liquid and have it gain (or lose) velocity and momentum- and relatively easy levels, at least to begin with, the game ends up becoming excruciatingly hard, demanding almost pixel perfect perfection from the player, lest he or she be thrown back to the beginning. Many a time, Puddle will have you grinding your teeth in frustration, gnashing them as you fail yet again, and yet you’ll find yourself persisting no matter what, simply because you know that your failure has to do not with broken design or imprecise controls- the level design is impeccable, and the controls are sharp, tight, and utterly responsive- it has to do simply because you could not respond to the game’s (admittedly demanding) needs. And so, you’ll yell and you’ll curse, but not the game, because the game is good at what it does, but at yourself for not being able to rise to the challenge.

And yet, in spite of all the frustrations that Puddle can induce, there is an odd, calming, almost hypnotic, trance inducing quality to the game. The graphics of the game are lovely, as each liquid flows through the environments (all convincingly crafted, by the way) in ultra slow motion. You can see individual droplets coming together, and you can see the liquid rippling, undulating, coalescing, deforming, reflecting, and seeing how convincingly each fluid moves is mesmerizing to say the least. Of course, the trance is almt often instantly broken as you are rudely reminded that you are in fact supposed to be guiding your liquid to its destination.

Puddle is a gem of a game. It’s incredibly hard, and that might put off many who lack the patience, but for those who can appreciate its grueling difficulty and the loving way with which it clearly revers physics and fluids, the game will be a revelation. As a retail release, I would have had no hesitation recommending it. As a digital release, it’s a freaking steal. Go for it.

In Puddle, players must guide a puddle of fluid to its target destination, not by moving the fluid, but by tilting the game world. A new experience based on physics and liquid properties, players must work with friction, momentum, and the unique properties of each type of fluid and environment to send as much of each puddle past fires, rifts, spills and more. The challenge lies in the fact that the fluid motion is realistic. If players tilt too quickly, droplets are left behind and if tilted too slowly, they may not be able to make certain jumps. Players also have to control their fluid and safely navigate through pipes, plants, laboratories, a human body, a sewer, a rocket, a foundry and a power station. The end goal- avoid being evaporated away. With endless twists, turns and surprises, Puddle tests puzzle fans like never before in an unparalleled physics-based puzzle platformer title.

Puddle is now available for Xbox Live.

In Puddle, players must guide a puddle of fluid to its target destination, not by moving the fluid, but by tilting the game world. A new experience based on physics and liquid properties, players must work with friction, momentum, and the unique properties of each type of fluid and environment to send as much of each puddle past fires, rifts, spills and more. The challenge lies in the fact that the fluid motion is realistic. If players tilt too quickly, droplets are left behind and if tilted too slowly, they may not be able to make certain jumps. Players also have to control their fluid and safely navigate through pipes, plants, laboratories, a human body, a sewer, a rocket, a foundry and a power station. The end goal- avoid being evaporated away. With endless twists, turns and surprises, Puddle tests puzzle fans like never before in an unparalleled physics-based puzzle platformer title.

Konami has released the launch trailer for their puzzle platformer. In the game, you play as a puddle of liquid and complete obstacle courses and stuff. The concept sounds interesting, and the game definitely looks fun.

Puddle is now available on Xbox Live and PSN.

The new screenshots showcase the broad variety of courses available to navigate. Players must dodge heat beams and rays of electric current that can fry their puddle, or handle a blob of radioactive fluid with care, follow a virtual puddle of rocket fuel through a hand drawn blueprint, and even follow a sip of water as it makes its way through a human body!

Konami’s released a new gameplay trailer for Puddle. What you do here is manoeuvre a think blob of liquid across certain terrain to its destination. Now, this isn’t that hard as it seems, as the game looks simply gorgeous.

The trailer is 1-min long but manages to show what the game is all about. It will be available on PSN and XBL soon.

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

Konami have announced the North American launch dates for Puddle. The game will be coming on January 25th on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network for the PlayStation 3 on January 31st.

What began as a student project that won a Student Showcase prize at Independent Gaming Festival at the Game Developer’s Conference 2010, is now a full-fledged downloadable game like nothing players have experienced before. In Puddle, gamers guide puddles of fluid through a variety of novel, themed environments (the human body, a garden, a foundry, and more). But to do so, they must tilt the environment, balancing each fluid’s unique properties with the environmental factors of gravity, friction, and each course’s obstacles. With players never being able to see the entire level from the start, Puddle will offer plenty of unexpected twists, keeping players alert and ready for the next challenge waiting for them around the corner. Puddle initially began as a project from six students from the French videogame school ENJMIN, and was ultimately picked up and developed by Neko Entertainment.