You’d think that two characters called FireBoy and WaterGirl would struggle to get along. After all, if they get too close turn they’re in danger of turning into a puff of smoke and a wisp of steam respectively. But inFireBoy …
You’d think that two characters called FireBoy and WaterGirl would struggle to get along. After all, if they get too close turn they’re in danger of turning into a puff of smoke and a wisp of steam respectively.
But inFireBoy and WaterGirl: The Hidden Forest they can’t live without each other, because every stage is an ingeniously constructed puzzle that can only be navigated by two characters working together.
The latest instalment in the acclaimed FireBoy and WaterGirl series, the game sees you attempting to guide each character to their own personal exit by pulling levers, activating devices, and generally navigating your way through a sequence of Rube Goldberg-style puzzles.
The trick is that certain elements can only come into contact with one character or the other. FireBoy can only interact with red objects, while WaterGirl can only interact with blue ones. Likewise, the former can’t survive in water, while the later can’t survive in fire.
And naturally there’s stuff that kills both characters, as well as buttons and levers that either of them can use.
Often this just means WaterGirl has to take one path while FireBoy takes another, or either one of them has to stand on a pressure pad to let the other one through a doorway.
But there are also situations where you need to work out how to get FireBoy and WaterGirl to the right places in the right order to complete the level, by shifting weights, holding down pressure pads, and so on.
The concept of solving puzzle stages with more than one character goes all the way back to The Lost Vikings in the 1990s, but the twist here is that you can control both FireBoy and WaterGirl at the same time.
Yep: using WASD for WaterGirl and the cursor keys for FireBoy, you can steer them through the stages simultaneously, which is as tricky as it sounds. If you find this head-patting-tummy-rubbing exercise too difficult you can always just move one character at a time.
Or, better still, you can play the game with a friend, the pair of you hunched over the same keyboard in the finest tradition of same-screen multiplayer action.
Check out FireBoy and WaterGirl: The Hidden Forest here. You can find loads of 2-player games on the Crazygames website here too.
