Picking up any new game for the first time, there's an elementary question of identity. Are you a part of the game's world, or apart from it - protagonist or a glorified spectator, fulcrum or false god or all of these things and more? In Fru - the possibly last, probably greatest of Xbox One's dedicated Kinect offerings - you play nothing. Not a mere non-entity in the sense that, say, Gordon Freeman is fundamentally just a reticule and a jump button, but a fluid, lurid absence, a hole in reality mapped by Kinect onto your silhouette.
Fortunately, there's more than one reality on offer. Your digital shadow is in fact a portal to a parallel dimension - an alternate version of each 2D environment with a different layout. Progress is about exposing the bits of each reality which allow your charge, a frail but nimble girl in a fox mask, to advance from left to right, while blocking dangerous objects such as lava flows from view. It's the setup for an amusing, exhausting platformer whose achievement derives from how it embraces the body as above all, something highly specific and saddled with peculiarities, rather than the generic, optimised instrument of fun that is bandied around in Kinect marketing materials.
Thus the pipe-smoking armchair academic take. The more down-to-Earth version is that Fru is an afternoon's worth of Twister played mostly standing up, where instead of straining to lay a finger on the spinner board, you're struggling to keep your grip on an Xbox One controller. The game's body mapping technology is dependable, and the pad controls straightforward enough: you move the girl with either left or right analog stick and jump with either trigger, which makes it possible to play with the pad in either hand. The first few puzzles are also fairly forgiving - a question of loitering to one side to uncover a ledge, or obscuring a pitfall with your palm - but the difficulty ramps up swiftly.
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