Although loads of Paper Mario followers are eagerly awaiting the return of one of many best video games within the sequence on the time of writing, there’s one other new sport set in a papery world that we’d counsel you take note of. Newfangled Video games’ Paper Path is the debut launch of the boutique London-based studio, and its good combination of artistic puzzle design with beautiful storybook visuals makes for a compelling puzzle expertise. Paper Path is a fairly easy sport at coronary heart, nevertheless it’s so recent in its concepts and execution that it’ll stick round in your thoughts lengthy after you’ve completed it.
Paper Path locations you within the function of Paige, an clever lady residing together with her household in a quiet seaside village who has aspirations of going to highschool to grow to be an astrophysicist. Her mother and father oppose her option to go to school, nonetheless, resulting in Paige operating away from her household and residential in the direction of her objectives. Alongside the way in which, she makes use of her means to alter actuality to assist strangers she encounters, who in flip present her with companionship as she will get farther away from house. It’s a fairly easy premise, nevertheless it’s helped drastically by the voiced ‘journal entries’ as you journey between worlds, which additionally assist flesh out Paige’s tragic backstory and motivations for selecting her vocation. It’s not precisely a ‘deep’ narrative, nevertheless it attracts you in and lulls you into a way of ease with its smooth magical realism.
The central gimmick of Paper Path’s puzzle design is that you should use Paige’s reality-bending powers to fold spacetime itself by grabbing the corners or edges of the paper pages she lives on and folding them over to create new pathways to achieve exits. Each stage has a reverse aspect with a special format than the front-facing web page, and also you’re often tasked with determining the correct sequence of folds to make and when to maneuver Paige as you traverse paths from each the back and front. Usually, you’ll have to make use of the identical a part of the reverse aspect a number of instances to reach at an answer, as you repeatedly fold, unfold, after which fold once more in several configurations whereas steadily shifting Paige ahead.
Issues get extra sophisticated as further stage gimmicks are tossed in to essentially soften your mind with every new world. There’s an early gimmick that includes clear tiles with faces resembling the six sides of a die and you may solely flip the tiles stable (and due to this fact walkable) in the event you handle to fold over an identical tile from the reverse aspect to align with its counterpart on the front-facing aspect. In one other instance, a later world introduces slidable tiles to ferry Paige round on both the X or Y axis, resulting in many situations the place that you must make your folds whereas additionally contemplating the place you’ll want the tile to bridge a spot and permit Paige to cross.
This all makes for a puzzler that feels equally concise and different. Paper Path is the type of sport that will get essentially the most out of its concepts with out overdoing something—nearly on the level the place it feels such as you’re prepared for one thing new, it throws in one other gimmick that forces you to reevaluate the way you strategy puzzles. On the identical time, it doesn’t really feel prefer it’s speeding via concepts or providing an excessively skinny expertise; its 10-hour runtime appears like lots sufficient to correctly discover its mechanics to their fullest extent. And for these of you who wish to get essentially the most worth out of it, there are a small handful of collectible origami constructs reachable solely by fixing particularly tough puzzles.
It is also a properly approachable expertise for gamers of all ability ranges, discovering elegant options that guarantee everybody can get pleasure from it to the fullest. Not solely is the issue curve expertly judged as puzzles construct on earlier concepts and slowly improve the complexity, however you possibly can ‘cheat’ at any time in the event you get caught. Each display screen enables you to carry up a clear step-by-step information which you can look at both to simply get a nudge on the following step or to study the entire set of steps for finishing that display screen. It solely exhibits you which ones folds to make, so it’s nonetheless on you to determine when and the place to maneuver Paige or different stage parts, however we nonetheless appreciated this feature to maintain issues shifting and reduce frustration.
As for its presentation, Paper Path does an impressive job of portraying an unlimited dreamlike world that also has a really ‘homey’ really feel no matter the place you go. Whether or not you’re being fastidiously watched by lovely frogs peering out from the inexperienced muck of a swamp or speaking with a brand new buddy you made as you heat your self by a campfire beneath a shiny moon, there’s an amazing sense of shifting via a residing world as you discover every new biome and work together with its inhabitants. Couple this liveliness with the papery aesthetic and a shiny and distinctive color palette that modifications anew in every world, and also you’ve received a sport that feels in some ways like a storybook come to life.
Pairing completely with these nice visuals, the soundtrack offers these worlds a really relaxed ambiance as numerous serene, piano-laden tracks play softly within the background. It’s not a very memorable assortment of songs, however we appreciated how a lot it helped in including to the immersion issue as your consideration is captured and also you’re drawn deeply into the environments.
The one actual grievance now we have about Paper Path is de facto extra of a nitpick, which is that the analog controls really feel just a bit bit too sensitive. It may be moderately cumbersome attempting to make use of the precise persist with middle the cursor exactly on the sides of the paper, and you probably have a number of paper edges lined up proper subsequent to one another, it may well typically seize one that you simply don’t imply to. You possibly can simply sidestep this, nonetheless, by simply utilizing contact controls for a way more intuitive expertise, however this then limits you to enjoying completely in handheld mode. Nonetheless, it hardly hampers the expertise — extra of a minor annoyance than a serious inconvenience.
Conclusion
Paper Path is likely one of the most interesting puzzle video games you should purchase for the Change proper now. The storybook narrative, compelling visuals, and cleverly designed conundrums, all come collectively to make for a chill and pleasurable expertise that you simply should not miss, and also you’d do nicely to regulate what Newfangled Video games does subsequent. We’d give this one a excessive advice to anybody on the lookout for a low-stakes but sufficiently difficult new addition to their puzzle library.
