Mastery is one of those words that gets thrown around when talking about games. As an interactive medium, games can give you a sense of accomplishment that, while not impossible to convey in non-interactive genres, comes naturally in an art form with failure states. If you can fail, it stands to reason that you can succeed.
While games aren’t monolithic in their design, many titles achieve this sense of accomplishment by putting you in control of a character who must overcome challenges set before them. Link completing a dungeon. Mario nimbly leaping across 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 the will of the individual? What if you have to change the world first?
Paper trail And Slidertwo recently released puzzle games, both of which task you with transforming the world in order to progress. Before I go too far down this argumentative rabbit hole, let me state that, narratively speaking, neither game is explicitly about “changing the world.” They both feature functional stories that are primarily intended to set up their gameplay, which in both cases is the star of the show. I wouldn’t call either of them a “story game.” And yet — if you’ll pardon the cliché — actions speak louder than words, and in games, mechanics often speak louder than dialog boxes.
Paper trail could be called a walking simulator, if you only focus on the actions of the main character Paige. All Paige does is walk. On iOS, where I played, you tap on a part of the screen and she walks there. Okay, fine, she occasionally pushes boulders and interacts 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 aligned with the top of the page, creating an unbroken path. The trick to each stage is to fold and unfold each page in such a way that Paige can travel from one end to the other. Complications such as pressure plates and dice-like blocks that must be matched with an identical counterpart multiply over time, making the midgame stages an exercise in experimentation and patience. But no matter how many complications the game introduces, what you always do in Paper trail folds the world into new shapes and arrangements, creates new paths out of impossible landscapes, makes the world walkable where it was once isolated. The world is malleable and it is up to you to shape it.
Slider takes a similar approach, but instead of folding the world, you can — well, you can probably guess based on the title. Do you like sliding puzzles? Those little arrangements of 3×3 grids with eight blocks that you slide around until you see the whole picture? Good, because that’s Slider In short, you don’t just look down on the puzzle from above; you walk around it, shuffling the world around you into new permutations and eventually returning it to its original state.
Slider combines the aesthetics of Little One, Substory‘s love of non sequiturs, and the sliding puzzles of a 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, collecting new tiles to place in sliding puzzles, which you can then move around to give your character more room to roam. Gimmicks are added over time, such as bioluminescent mushrooms that can only be traversed if activated by a nearby light source, or an area where you rotate the tiles instead of sliding them. Even more than Paper trail, Slider gives the feeling that you are traveling through an interconnected world, but that this interconnectedness is only due to your actions.
I played both games right after each other ArrangerAnother game released in the past few months where moving the world is just as important as moving the character. When I think back on my experience with each of them, what made each one so new – especially considering the games were in conversation with each other – was how they challenged me to approach them with a different mindset than I normally would. Instead of asking, “What’s in front of me, and how do I top it?” I found myself approaching all three games with the question, “What’s in front of me, and how do I change it?”
This may seem like a subtle shift in terminology, not worth distinguishing, but I don’t think so. Each actually implies a radically different philosophy. When you view the world as something to be surpassed, you accept it as it is in certain ways. For better or for worse, this is the way things are. My only role, then, is to do my best to overcome obstacles as they are. But when you ask instead how the world might change, how the world might be transformed, you start to approach problems with a very different mindset. You start to wonder if things might be easier if we changed structure X to look like Y. You start to consider if new paths might open up if we just changed our perspective on Z. I’m not trying to be too vague about it, but I think games, through their mechanics, have the power to induce different mindsets in you. After all, what is a game if not a prescribed sequence of actions communicated to you by the developers? What is a game if not 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 defeat them, you must see the world not as a static, unmoving thing, but as something you can influence for the better. You must think about mastery in a new way: to see your environment not as an enemy, but as part of a larger puzzle. You must change the world.
Paper trail was released on May 21 on iOS via Netflix, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. Slider was released on 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.