Game: Princess of the Water Lilies
Genre: Adventure
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Whyknot Studios, Red Dunes Games | Red Dunes Games
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $14.99 | UK £12.79 | EU € 14,79
Release Date: November 20, 2025
Review code provided with many thanks to PR Hound.
Princess of the Water Lilies is here to join the world of the 2D puzzle platformer, and what it offers, in addition to the challenges to your reflexes and your memory for patterns, is a world of gorgeous art and adorable animals. As with Stray and Little Kitty, Big City, your protagonist is a feline most supreme — in fact, she’s the titular princess.
The game asks you to trot, jump, purr, and, most of all, explore in order to preserve the peaceful world the princess is part of. She’s chosen to be a protector by the world she grew up in, a froggy wonderland of Ghibli-style magic and predatory machines. Does it all come together in a true hero’s journey? Let’s find out.
Princess and Protector of the Water Lilies
With pure affection and amusement, the origin story of our feline princess is cutely similar to the story of Moses left in the bulrushes. Frogs pluck a kitten from the flowing waters and raise her among their own kind. She doesn’t croak, but she is a fluffy, majestic little creature, and she’s present during a festival in which the great guardian frog marks their new protector, choosing their adoptee and granting her the powers of the water lilies. Instead of croaks, her power comes from her purr.
It’s an adorable opening at the end of a brief tutorial section, and save for on-screen button prompts to teach you the controls, it’s all wordlessly told. That means a little of what I’ve just described is interpretive, but I promise the gist is right. That’s how clearly the game tells the start of our kitty’s tale.
Naturally, it’s not long before this bucolic festival is followed by tragedy, as a mechanical monstrosity invades the wetlands. You’ll need the skills you’ve just learned to survive the beast and to continue on to end this new threat.
Platforming for Newbies
There’s no way to sugarcoat this: I am bad at platforming games. I’ve made it through one Metroid game in total, and I can handle the Castlevanias that have RPG aspects, so I can make up for my twitch skills. Yet Princess of the Water Lilies isn’t here to make crummy jumpers like me feel bad. Yes, failure can happen quickly, and you’re not burdened by a large health bar. But trying again is fast and painless.
Load times are near instant on the Steam Deck, so it’s an annoyed little meow and a flop, and a second later, you’re either dropped back a reasonable space before your failure, or, in some cases, you’ll even find yourself right after the bit that bedevilled you, had you been close enough to the end anyway.
The bosses operate in a similar way; they’re often multi-stage and may (fairly slowly) continue to push you towards the far edge of the screen in a side-scrolling duel, and you’ll need to platform and puzzle your way through until your purr knocks down the big bad. It’ll take a fair amount of practice, but experienced platformers won’t find the bits of combat difficult at all.
If you’re bad, like me, well, they’re going to take a while. But we can do them, and Princess of the Water Lilies does a lovely job of making sure you don’t feel too frustrated while trying it.
The Art of the Water Lilies
The princess is an adorable, slightly sad-faced little beast. She looks a bit mixed between a fluffy forest cat and an exotic shorthair (cozy manga fans may recognize the latter as the breed featured in A Man and his Cat, with the chunky Fukumaru equally plushy and smush-faced), but her mien is regal and proud. She doesn’t make big steppies; she prances with confidence through her wetland kingdom, and her animation cycles are never anything less than wonderful to watch.
The frogs, too, are particularly adorable among their kind, and their croaks are soothing and peaceful, making your quest feel all the more important. You don’t want to disappoint these cuties.
The forests and mushroom caves you’ll encounter are equally colorful and pretty to explore. There’s never a lack of anything to look at as you figure your way from zone to zone — a little bit of help from the frog gods will make sure you’re able to fast travel around, cutting down on even more potential annoyances — and that, too, helps ease any frustrations you might have with the puzzles and platforming you need to do. It all comes together extremely well.
The Bit About Physically Playing The Game
While the game currently has no information about Steam Deck compatibility, I’m sure that’s something that will change shortly. The game is controller-perfect straight out of the box. I would, in fact, suggest that’s the best way to play; mouse controls aren’t going to give you anything extra here.
Response times are excellent, and there’s a firmness to how your kitty handles that will get you used to where she’s going to jump and how quickly she’ll do it. That’ll be useful during segments where you have to account for dangers flying around, because you don’t just want to watch out for where the hazards land. You have to think fast so you don’t jump into midair flaming debris or what have you.
Again, these are challenges to the platformer-challenged, but they are very reasonable challenges. I would suggest that Princess of the Water Lilies is an excellent entry to platformers in general, with easy continues, no nine lives to worry about, and bosses with stable patterns to learn and conquer.
Conclusion
Princess of the Water Lilies is beautifully crafted to become a lovely first choice for a platformer game. With intuitive controls, lovely art, and a clear, compelling story told without dialogue, it’s a small treasure of a game that will welcome both new players and gamers who love puzzles but struggle with platformers.
The music and sound effects are equally lovely, coming together in a game that’s just really nicely put together all around. I may be bad at this game, but it doesn’t make me feel bad for that fact, and I found it encouraging to keep trying again.
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up
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