Mastery is one of those words that gets tossed around when we talk about games. As an interactive medium, games can imbue in you a sense of accomplishment that, while not impossible to convey in noninteractive genres, comes naturally in an art form with fail states. If you can fail, it stands to reason that you can succeed.
Though games are not monolithic in how they are designed, many titles achieve this sense of accomplishment by putting you in control of a character who must conquer challenges in front of them. Link completing a dungeon. Mario deftly hopping over platforms. And on. Mastery, in these contexts, is the triumph of the individual over the world. You win by coming out on top, by not succumbing to the harshness of your environment. You win by successfully navigating the world around you. But what if, to succeed, you need more than individual will? What if you have to change the world first?
Paper Trail and Slider, two recently released puzzle games, both task you with transforming the world in order to progress. Before I go too far down this argumentative rabbit hole, I want to state that, narratively, neither game is explicitly about “changing the world.” They both feature functional stories meant primarily to set up their gameplay, which in both instances is the star of the show. I would not call either a “story game.” And yet — if you’ll permit a tired phrase — actions speak louder than words, and, in games, mechanics often speak louder than dialogue boxes.
Paper Trail could be called a walking simulator, if you focus solely on the actions of main character Paige. All Paige does is walk. On iOS, where I played, you tap a part of the screen and she walks there. OK, fine, she does occasionally push boulders and interact with other elements. But mostly, she walks (slowly).
The real action of Paper Trail is in the manipulation of the world around Paige. Divided into squares and rectangles, each level of Paper Trail can be folded by dragging the corners of the page. Underneath each page are new paths and patterns that can be matched to the topside of the page, creating an unbroken path. The trick with every stage is to fold and unfold each page such that Paige can traverse from one end to the other. Complications like pressure plates and dice-like blocks that must be matched to an identical counterpart multiply over time, making the midgame stages into an exercise in experimentation and patience. But no matter how many complications the game introduces, what you are always doing in Paper Trail is folding the world into new shapes and arrangements, creating new pathways out of impossible landscapes, making the world traversable where once it was isolated. The world is malleable, and it’s up to you to shape it.
Slider takes a similar approach, but instead of folding the world, you — well, you can probably guess based on the title. Do you like slide puzzles? Those little arrangements of 3×3 grids with eight blocks that you slide around until you reveal the whole picture? Good, because that’s Slider in a nutshell, except you’re not just looking down on the puzzle from above; you’re walking around on it as you slide the world around you into new permutations and, eventually, return it to its former self.
Slider combines the aesthetics of Minit, Undertale’s love of non sequiturs, and the slide puzzles of a whole lot of games. It’s a charming package, made all the more appealing by the fact that it’s completely free. You progress through a series of areas, accumulating new tiles to place into slide puzzles, which you can then move to allow your character more room to roam. Gimmicks are added over time, like bioluminescent mushrooms that are only traversable if activated by a nearby light source, or an area where you rotate the tiles instead of sliding them. Even more so than Paper Trail, Slider gives the sense that you are traversing an interconnected world, but one that is only interconnected because of your actions.
I played both games right after Arranger, another game released in the last few months where moving the world is as important as moving the character. In reflecting on my experience with each, what made them all feel so novel — especially considering the games in conversation with each other — was how they challenged me to approach them with a different mindset than I would typically bring to a game. Instead of asking, “What’s in front of me and how do I surpass it?” I found myself approaching all three games with the question, “What’s in front of me and how do I change it?”
Perhaps this seems like a subtle shift in terminology, unworthy of distinction, but I don’t think so. Each actually implies a radically different philosophy. When considering the world as something to surpass, you are, in some ways, accepting it for how it is. For good or for ill, this is how things are. My only role, then, is to do my best to navigate the obstacles as they stand. But when you ask instead how the world might be changed, how the world might be transformed, you begin to approach problems with a very different mindset. You begin to ask whether things might be easier if we changed X structure to look like Y. You begin to consider whether new pathways might open if we only changed our perspective on Z. I’m not trying to be too woo-woo about it, but I think games, through their mechanics, have the capacity to instill different mindsets in you. What is a game, after all, but a prescribed set of actions communicated from the developers to you? What is a game but a way of seeing, of acting?
Paper Trail and Slider are both games about changing the world. To master them, which is to say, to beat them, you have to look at the world not as a static, unmovable thing but as something you have the ability to affect for the better. You have to think of mastery in a new way: to see your environment not as the enemy but as part of the larger puzzle. You have to change the world.
Paper Trail was released May 21 on iOS via Netflix, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. Slider was released July 24 on Windows. We reviewed Paper Trail on iOS via Netflix, and Slider on Windows via Steam. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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