It's rather appropriate that the idea for Paper Trail - a game where you have to fold paper to solve puzzles - came from a brainstorming session where Newfangled Games' founders and brothers, Henry and Fred Hoffman, folded the paper of their hand drawn levels, then noticed that the puzzles on the front and the back could combine to make an even bigger puzzle. This one magic idea stuck from the off - but Newfangled Games' debut indie didn't always look like the polished puzzler it is now. There were some conceptual design bumps in the road, a trip to Boxpark Shoreditch, and a Netflix deal to chase before they could reach Paper Trail's true potential.

In the release version of Paper Trail, you play as Paige, who runs away from the 'forgotten seaside town' of Southfold to pursue her dream of attending university and becoming an Astrophysicist. Instead of just catching the train like the rest of us, Paige bends the space-time continuum to fold the world around her. You see her rural world from a top-down perspective, like looking at a piece of paper, and then you fold the world, just like that paper, to reveal the pattern on the other side to create paths, move objects, and combine symbols. A simple mechanic that creates some deceptively hard, but rewarding, puzzles. However, initially, Paper Trail was more of a sidescroller, but "there wasn't a huge amount of variety you could do with it," Henry Hoffman tells me as I chat with him on a video call. "It was interesting one-off interactions, but it didn't really have any scope beyond that."

So then Paper Trail transformed into more of a Metroidvania, where you fold the map itself rather than the levels. "And it's funny," Henry tells me, "because we weren't aware of Carto at the time, and I don't think Carto had come out, but that's very much what that ended up doing, where you're zooming out and manipulating the environment and rearranging." But this map folding didn't work for them either, "because there wasn't any real immediate feedback from folding the macro environment," Henry explains. "You would do that and then you wouldn't really see exactly what had happened, it would be a little bit confusing and disorienting."

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I’d like to start this review with a question: What’s the difference between overcoming a challenge and thinking “I did it!” and one that leaves you sighing “It’s over!”? I may leave little insights scattered throughout. A Paper Trail, if you will. A puzzle game named Paper Trail that has you solve discrete head-scratchers by folding the screen like a piece of paper in different ways to create new paths, I might even say, if I were trying to cram a bunch of information right at the top without breaking theme. Let’s talk about it.

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Hello and welcome back to What To Play! We've returned from a little hiatus, which you definitely noticed and have been very sad about, of course. It's finally edging towards spring here in the UK, but don't let that tempt you into going outside, there's video games to be a-playin'!

As ever, this is where we'll round up the best games from the month gone by, and the things we're most excited to play from the month ahead - plus, any other suggestions for what might complement it. Here's What To Play This May 2024.

Availability: Out now on PC, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

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Puzzles are a tricky thing to perfect in video games. They're present in so many different genres - typically giving us some small goal to work towards between blasting enemies and searching for resources - but are also rarely as engaging as they could be, when not a game's main focus. For more creative solutions (and creative problems) we have to turn to the dedicated puzzle genre, of course. These days, indie games rule the space, but with so many out there in the wild west of digital storefronts what makes a puzzler stand out? Paper Trail answers this with one basic idea: folding paper.

Folding the piece of paper your character is standing on reveals the picture on the underside of that page, which can have keys, doors, and pathways to your destination. Or, the underside can fill in part of a pattern required to magically unlock other areas. You can fold pages from the top, bottom, sides, or four corners. Playing Paper Trail is as straight-forward as that, but simple controls do not equal a simple game.

I'd hazard a guess we've all had to push a heavy object onto a switch to get through a door at some point in our gaming histories, so it's no surprise Paper Trail includes this almost customary puzzle in its demo. However, I've never had to fold my way to the solution before. With this one addition, a mainstay puzzle suddenly requires a whole new way of thinking. What corner do I fold first? In what order? Where should the statue be when I start to fold? Where should I be standing? It doesn't have a wildly complicated solution, but it does feel satisfying when the lightbulb moment happens. This one new layer of thinking is easy enough to comprehend, but tough enough to impress.

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