Paper Trail Review

Developed and published by new indie studio Newfangland Games, Paper Trail is a top-down puzzle adventure in which you play as a young girl called Paige who’s leaving home to go to university. After seeing the initial announcement of the game, I was immediately interested in trying out this original take on puzzles.

After starting the game, you’re presented to its setting — a girl starts telling you about a cottage with two old parents and their daughter. She was just accepted into university, but they didn’t want her to go, so she wrote a letter saying she was running away to attend. Unsurprisingly, our main character who’s telling the story is the one running away. And according to her, her hobbies are journaling, origami, and bending the spacetime continuum. Paper Trail is divided into chapters, and each time you finish a chapter, you get another few minutes of Paige telling you something about herself. The narrative gets more interesting as you progress through the game, but I do not want to spoil anything, so trust me when I say it’s good.

These little “cutscenes” also act as a sort of tutorial, teaching you the basic gameplay, which is folding a paper, basically. While Paige is telling you this story, you are shown a drawing on a piece of paper; the other, unseen side of it has different drawings on it, and you have to figure out how to correctly fold it in order to show the next picture. The actual game has the same core principle of folding paper, except now the paper is the world itself, and you need to fold it in a way that allows you to get to where you need to go. Sometimes, the puzzles were a little too easy and sometimes a little too hard, so the level design isn’t perfect, but at least for the very hard levels, you can get some hints or even the entire solution to the puzzle by pressing “h”. Even so, Paper Trail’s mechanics are creative and fun, so I’d love to see more things like it.

The 2D art in the game is hand-drawn, which fits really well with its themes. Other than people looking a tad off, it actually looks pretty good: a lot of rooms are absolutely beautiful, and even the worst ones look more than fine. The animations don’t exactly stand out, but they’re not bad, either.

There’s some voice acting in Paper Trail, though only for Paige and in the cutscenes, but it exists. Other than that, when people talk, they just make random sounds, like in most indie games. While it’s pretty standard, I honestly would have preferred there to be no sounds when people speak, as it’s a little weird and, at least for me, breaks the immersion.

While the game is great, Paper Trail does have some issues, though none of them are huge. For starters, the walking speed of our character is not exactly fast, to say the least. I found myself already knowing how to solve the puzzle and only being limited by Paige’s running abilities, which are non-existent, in order to finish a level. Another issue is the amount of playtime, which is very short — I’m not exactly good at puzzle games, and it took me less than four hours to finish a playthrough. If you were to try and get all achievements, I’m sure it’d take a lot longer, but for someone just looking to experience the regular game, it can feel very short.

Overall, though, Paper Trail is great; it’s a short, fun, and innovative experience that tells a compelling story in a really nice form. There are some problems with how it works, but it’s not bad in the slightest, and anyone who likes 2D puzzle games is sure to enjoy it. Whether it’s worth the price for most people, I can’t say — depends on how long of an experience you want for £16.75 because if it’s more than three to five hours, this might not be for you.