Having a small baby may have stopped me from doing any megagames and escape rooms (so far), and affected my ability to play board games, but it’s actually given me either more time, and something of a renewed interest, in video games.
You can boot them up when the baby goes down for a nap or for the night. They don’t need to be tidied up to stop little hands from grabbing the components. You can step away from them at a moment’s notice (at least, the type I play you can).
But enough about why there are suddenly more video game reviews on this blog, and on to today’s game review – Paper Trail!
Paper Trail
Paper Trail is a top-down puzzle adventure about leaving home, set in a foldable, paper world. You play as Paige, a budding academic, leaving home for the first time to pursue her studies. On the journey, you learn to fold the world, merging two sides to solve puzzles, explore new areas and uncover long-lost secrets.
About the game
Our protagonist, Paige, is a quirky girl who lives in a rural cottage with her parents. She’s just been accepted to university to study astrophysics, but her parents don’t want her to go. So she decides to sneak away, using a special power she has…
Origami, but make it puzzles! It’s a straightforward puzzle game where the gimmick is that your player character can fold up the world she lives in to see the other side of the digital paper. You need to fold up pages to create paths in front of her, so she can walk to the next piece of paper.
There are some rules of course. You can’t fold paper on top of Paige, or unfold paper she’s standing on. You also can’t fold paper on top of already folded paper – no seven folds limit here, you’ve just got the one. And you can only fold onto paper, so the most you can fold a page is in half. Finally, you can only fold orthogonally from an edge, or diagonally from a corner.
What I loved
It’s a straight-forward puzzle game with beautiful artwork throughout, so if those are two of your interests you are likely to enjoy this game.
Each chapter introduces a new variation on the folding puzzle, such as keys to open gates, movable pillars that can’t be folded over, and levers that switch on beams of light. As you progress, you will encounter puzzles that incorporate multiple of these special features. You need to move Paige around and fold up the paper to tackle these increasingly complex problems.
There is a built-in hint system which you can access at any time. It shows you in what order you need to fold the pages to solve the puzzle, but doesn’t give it all away as you will still need to work out where to move Paige and/or the moveable elements within each level.
I quite enjoyed the basis of the story being a girl who wants to study astrophysics but her parents won’t let her. As someone who studied physics herself at university (though with my parents’ full support), I immediately found a common element with her and wanted her to succeed!
What I didn’t like
Between chapters, there were cut scenes that developed the story, introducing her to some of the characters she met along the way, but also flashbacks to a brother who mysteriously vanished. These seemed honestly very disconnected from the rest of the game, and it would have been nice to have the plot come out during the gameplay more. Additionally, each cut scene was done through a series of pieces of paper that – you guessed it – needed to be folded and unfolded in a specific way to progress through them. This made the cut scenes quite laborious, as there wasn’t the challenge element in the regular game.
The story is quite pleasant, but overall the pacing felt odd to me – the game covered just her journey to university, and then the epilogue literally had her entire university experience of several years. Honestly I think it would have been better paced if it had ended at her arrival to uni, or perhaps going home after her first year. This would also leave space for a sequel set during her university time.
For me, the difficulty levels were a bit off, as I actually found the final level to be one of the easiest. This meant that the end of the game felt less rewarding, as it wasn’t as much of a challenge as some of the mid-game levels.
And as mentioned, the hint system doesn’t tell you how to fully complete a level, which can make it somewhat frustrating if you’re still stuck after looking at the hint.
Summary
If you enjoy puzzle games, beautiful artwork and a plot that isn’t at the heart of the game, you will likely really enjoy Paper Trail. It took me around 3-4 hours to complete it, including about half the achievements, so it’s not a long game, but it’s very sweet and a good game to fill the gaps between more intensive ones.