Whenever you go to gaming conventions, there’s generally that one game that is always packed with people waiting to play it. You either have to get to that booth as soon as the doors open, or stand there camping out in the queue like it’s Splash Mountain. At WASD this year, that game was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Paper Trail.
I lost count of the number of times I went over hoping to snag a seat, but ultꦏimately I had to head there first thing one morning to ensure I got a chance to play it. Getting there early also meant I didn’t feel as pressured to speed through it, as fewer people were waiting to play. It also meant fewer people were there to witness my spectacular failure of getting stuck on the first puzzle.
Like most people, exploring indie games to find a hidden gem is one of my favourite pastimes at gaming conventions. I know they say don’t jꦕudge a book by its cover, but I’m drawn to the large signs above booths, so if I see some quirky little artwork, I’m like a moth to a flame. Despite being hidden at one end of the hall, Paper Trail drew in crowds because of its distinctive artwork, and then it was easy for the gameplay to catch your eye as you watched people folding small squares of paper on the screen. It takes something as mundane as folding paper and makes it an innovative puzzler.
Paper Trail is a top-down puzzle adventure that utilises ♑the ingenious mechanic of having the player fold the environment to create new pathways to allow the protagonist Paige (I see what you did there, Newfangled Games) to reach her destination. It seems so simple, yet it’s utterly fascinating. I’m a terrible backseat gam෴er when it comes to puzzles. If I try to watch people play, I get twitchy fingers as I just want to grab and solve it myself.
Each page has a landscape on it, but then has a different layout on the reverse. You have to fold the paper from different angles and to different degrees to find the ⛎correct solution to create a way for Paige to navigate the terrain. I got stuck from the get-go because I was completely daft and thought you could only fold in from the corners, when actually you can fold in from any of the straight sides, too. Once I had the core mechanic down, though, I had a ball.
You’ll traverse through different handcrafted environments and meet various characters, all of which feature priꦛntmaking and watercolour textures, offering a picture book-esque charm that’s hard to resist. Each area has a unique theme and offers new challenges. After completing the first area, which seemed pretty stra🥂ightforward once I had the hang of the basics, the next landscape was mostly waterlogged. Two annoying characters swanning about in a boat were there to tease me as I struggled to pair jetties together by folding paper to try and get over to them, page after page. I got there in the end, though. Take that, smug sailors!
The gameplay builds on what you already know, so wꦍhen you’ve just about mastered the last mechanic, it challenges you with something new to keep you invested and feeling engaged. No one wants a puzzle game that&rsqඣuo;s too easy, after all.
In the last area in the demo, I had to dra😼g a statue around and move it onto a pressure plate to cont🔯inue. Afterward, the junior designer Kyle Newman told me that I’d actually used an unintentional shortcut to move the statue. He told me it’s something that players keep doing, finding solutions that the developers didn’t intend to have, some of which the team then patches later because it makes too much of the problem-solving obsolete.
The WASD demo 🧜didn&rsqu🌠o;t give much background to Paige, but the website explains that this is a tale about leaving home and setting out on your own adventure, and I could tell from the interactions with characters and emotive soundtrack that this will tug on the heartstrings.
It’s all too easy to fall in love with Paper Trail. The core folding mechanic of the game seems so simple, yet it’s so satisfyingly challenging to overcome. It’s the kind of game that you could easily lose yourself in for hours, and despite getting stumped a few times, it’s not frustratingly difficult enough to make you want to give up. Paper Trail set to launch later this year for Steam, 🥂Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, and mobile devices. You can currently .
