Paper Trail

A delightful game about folding your way through space

The title image for Paper Trail gives nothing away, aside from its delightful art style. Image credit: Newfangled Games

The story of how I came to review Paper Trail is an interesting one. I’d seen some stuff about it during the last Wholesome Direct, and while the game looks absolutely gorgeous, I have so many games on my list right now that I’m trying not to add any to it, so I didn’t really take note. One of those “I’ll probably get to this next year” kind of things. My list is so long, pals.

I might write in more detail about the precise events that led to this review in a separate article (I don’t want to shine a light on this at the expense of highlighting the actual game), but essentially, it got review bombed from an 8.0 to a 5.4 which really ground my gears. So here we are.

Paper Trail is a puzzle game with a really neat premise and some of the most beautiful and charming art I’ve seen in ages. In the game, you are guiding Paige on her journey to university to study astrophysics by folding the screens at the corners or sides to create paths. There are nine chapters and each one has a slight variation on this folding theme. Early in the game, there will just be one square piece of paper to fold to guide Paige along but as the game progresses, there will be more pieces of paper in a puzzle, in different shapes, and with different mechanics.

The chapters are relatively short so there’s never an opportunity for a new mechanic to really outstay its welcome, and the difficulty can only ever escalate to a point before you move on to a new area and things get a little simpler again while they introduce a new mechanic. There was a point early on when I did feel a creeping sense of dread that the complexity of the puzzles was going to climb to dizzying heights, leaving me on the ground and confused, and it did do that, but that’s because I am bad at puzzle games, not because it got disproportionately more difficult.

The puzzles start off simple enough and get harder. Image credit: Newfangled Games

There’s so much about Paper Trail that I wanted to love but that’s the truth of it, y’all. I’m really really bad at whatever kind of lateral thinking is required to be good at or derive any sense of satisfaction from these puzzles. I really want to underline the fact that this is a me problem, not the game. I can see how they are meant to be satisfying to solve, my brain just seems to lack that satisfaction trigger.

If you look the game up and read some of the genuine reviews (not the ones from the anti-woke brigade) one of the chief complaints is that there is an extremely accessible hint button that people found it hard not to lean on when they became even slightly stuck, which undermines the point of a puzzle game (to get stuck and then figure out the answer). I too, leaned heavily on this button, which told you which folds to make and in what order. However, I frequently had to look up a YouTube guide for help because the in-game hint button doesn’t show you where to move Paige and all the objects required to solve the puzzles, just the folds needed. So it managed to make the game too easy for some people but didn’t provide enough guidance for the true idiots like me.

Again, this is a me problem. I think I am broadly speaking worse at these kinds of puzzles than the average person who would buy this game. I kind of realised a few things while playing Paper Trail. Firstly, I desperately want to be the kind of person who plays and loves puzzle games, who can look at something abstract and solve it. I want to get that “aha moment” and feel briefly smug and then humbled by the next, even more complex puzzle. But I just don’t think I am! I really very much want to be, and I know part of this is that my closest friends are all exceptionally clever people and I feel constantly outclassed by them. It really feels like in order to fit in with these incredible people, I should be a puzzle solver, a smart thinker of some kind. As with many things in this review, this is a me problem. They have never made me feel inferior or like I am not smart enough to be friends with them. I get frustrated too quickly, I can’t change how I think about something, and I can never figure out the points when I am allowed, nay expected, to think outside the pre-existing rules a game has set for me. I have seen some of the later levels of Baba Is You (I only ever got to the second area) and I cannot imagine how anyone can come to the conclusions that the game demands of you. Not only can I not solve the puzzles, I can’t even imagine how they can be solvable. I think I am the sort of person who plays and loves puzzle games. But that’s not really true – I want to be this kind of person but I’m not. And yet I keep trying – this is not a new revelation to me! I have always lacked patience and been easily frustrated, and yet I keep buying puzzle games.

The art in this game is utterly gorgeous. Look at the little froggies! Image credit: Newfangled Games

All that being said, I don’t actually think it’s all puzzle games that are a problem for me. I like a certain degree of logical deduction. I really enjoyed The Case of the Golden Idol even though that game also made me feel very out of my depth. It’s not even that I want to be able to brute force answers, which you can’t realistically do in Paper Trail because there are so many permutations of folding and moving Paige. I really don’t think I’ve learned anything from this, to be quite honest with you. I am still going to keep trying out new puzzle games, not least because I am always so impressed with the cool mechanics that puzzle games include. I think the mechanics behind Paper Trail are really cool and it does a great job of mixing things up as you progress.

I also came to realise how much weight the art and sound design of a game can carry. At about the halfway point, a large part of me reasoned that I had played enough to get a sense of the game and that I could probably write a reasonable thorough review without subjecting myself to three more hours of feeling really stupid. My own brain handily provided two counterarguments to its own request to clock off early though. Firstly, the only game I didn’t finish for this blog was Hotline Miami and while I actually believe quite strongly in the joy of being done with things, I feel a different sense of obligation when reviewing something, particularly when it’s based on how long that thing is. How could I slot it into my directory without a completed playtime? The second argument that was frankly pretty unexpected (even to me, and this conversation was happening inside my own brain), was that I really wanted to see the later areas of the game. It is absolutely gorgeous and has a soundtrack to match, to the point that I wanted to battle through the struggle and see what the later areas looked like. I don’t think my screenshots do justice to just how good this game looks. It is abundantly clear that a lot of love went into the creation of this game.

I liked how the shape of the pages changes as you progress through the game. Image credit: Newfangled Games

I will say that one area that the game is somewhat lacking is the story. The overarching plot of “guiding Paige to university” is fine, but it’s intercut with flashbacks to her brother going missing as a child which didn’t really work at all in the cute cartoon art style, and also didn’t really go anywhere! If you’ll forgive me a story spoiler, the game was setting it up for Paige to use her magical paper-turning abilities to locate her missing brother, but it’s later revealed that he drowned. I was absolutely bamboozled by this choice, honestly. It would have made a ton of sense if Paige’s brother went missing in a fold of space-time and she was able to use her abilities and knowledge gained from her journey or her degree to find him, but no. This was so far out of left field to me that I am still reeling.

I don’t actually think the plot is that important in a puzzle game. It’s nice to have the levels linked together by some kind of narrative, and the “Paige is going to university” does that well, but the flashbacks and cutscenes were just unnecessary in my opinion. I don’t know what they were trying to achieve with them in terms of the point they wanted to make, which makes me think they must have missed the mark for me at least.

I think overall anyone who likes puzzle games, doubly so if they also enjoy cute art and beautiful soundtracks, will love Paper Trail. The story doesn’t land for me personally, but I generally rate that as pretty unimportant in a puzzle game like this. The concept behind the puzzles is really cool and not something I’ve seen before, it builds on the core concept with interesting takes for each new area and it never escalates too far in terms of difficulty before you move on to the next challenge. And I’ve learned nothing and will continue to try to play puzzle games.

• Game: Paper Trail

• Developer: Newfangled Games

• Publisher: Newfangled Games

• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, Mobile

• Note - I receive the key for this game for free to write this review

Quick Play is fully self-funded and reader-supported, so any encouragement or contributions are most welcome. Subscribe on Substack or donate on Ko-fi. Thank you.