Despite being a fan of puzzle games, for the past year or so, I found myself mostly playing RPGs and action titles. Until Children of the Sun’s unique take on spatial puzzles and telekinetic bullet control piqued my interest in playing more puzzles again. Over the past month, I came across three delightful puzzles. Paper Trail, Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. If you have seen these games, you know that one is definitely not like the others.
A few months ago, inspired by Children of the Sun, we discussed the foundation of a good puzzle game – a unique core mechanic or an existing mechanic with a unique twist. I also mentioned that some games add emotion and depth through other elements like narrative and philosophical themes. Today, I want to explore how these three titles put what we already discussed into play at differing degrees. Two take the core mechanic route, and one uses narrative details with logic puzzles to create a world that boggles the mind.
The Solid Concept: Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom
The Core Mechanic:
Aarik and the Ruined Kingdom follows a young prince who uses his father’s perspective-bending crown to put the Kingdom back together and hopefully save his father. The concept is simple: manipulate your perspective of the level to reach the exit.
This is accomplished by hitting Q or E to rotate the camera to face one of the sides of the square. When you find a potential path, you click to move the prince to a spot or to have him interact with an environmental/puzzle element.
How it Evolves:
Along the way, you find the crown’s gems that help you fix the ruined Kingdom. Within the demo, we only get access to a Ruby that helps Prince Aarik telekinetically move and ‘rejuvenate’ items within the level. In gameplay, the player clicks on red items to drag them into place.
The Verdict:
There is nothing completely unique about the core mechanic of the game. There are a lot of brilliant perspective puzzlers, like Echochrome. In these instances, we consider how the gameplay is tweaked to create a new experience. For starters, the game constrains how you change perspective. Since you can only spin on one plane, you need to look around to see how to move things to get Aarik to the goal. Secondly, adding the various gems means that you are not just changing the perspective but actively manipulating the environment outside of just moving platforms around.
The 15-minute demo was actually great at showing this game’s potential. We get to play through 7 levels that scale up in complexity. You quickly move from just spinning the level to find a path to moving elements, pressing buttons, and using a gem to create a path. If the game keeps this trajectory, it has the potential to be a challenge even while it hits its ‘relaxing’ game goals.
The Unique, Slow Burn: Paper Trail
The Core Mechanic:
Paper Trail follows Paige’s journey as she leaves home for college. Her biggest obstacle? A world ravaged by a storm. We, Paige’s guide, can easily solve this problem by folding the backgrounds to cover obstacles and create new paths for her to keep moving forward. (I just realized I might have a thing for perspective-changing puzzles.)
It’s a cool mechanic that I haven’t played before. All you have to do is click and drag the edges or corners to fold the background. To help you identify what you should fold, you can take a peek at the back of the ‘sheet.’ Of course, you can’t fold the sheet over Paige as that would defeat the purpose, so you must also consider where to place her as you look for your way forward. Once you identify a path, you just need to click on it, and Paige will walk to it if a path is made.
How it evolves:
The fun bit about Paper Trail is that you don’t just fold the sheet to find paths. Most of the time, you also use the paper-folding mechanic to solve the puzzles and open the paths. From completing background runes to unlock doors, matching runes to solidify paths, or even creating paths for puzzle blocks. It results in some interesting back and forth since the background can’t fold over Paige’s character or over itself.
The Verdict:
Paper Trail seems easy, thanks to its gorgeous color palette and overall vibes. In the beginning, it is. I was disappointed that I could solve the puzzles through trial and error. I was pretty sure that the potential of this mechanic had been squandered. Thankfully, I was wrong. Later in the game, the level design completely takes advantage of the mechanic. This game gets interesting and wildly challenging pretty quickly. This is thanks to the addition of a variety of different types of platforms and locks, as well as many interlinking backgrounds.
The Mind Bender: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
The Core Concept:
This game has us follow Lorelie to an empty hotel in the middle of Europe, where she has been invited to join the ultimate ‘art’ project. Her mysterious benefactor encourages her to discover the project’s goal so that she can participate in it. As Lorelei, we find a world locked behind doors and puzzles, filled with many mysteries and even supernatural entities. The key to solving these puzzles is often hidden in plain sight, buried in letters, books, and the environment.
There is no unique mechanic to solving this game. Most locks are combination puzzles. Finding the key is about using comprehension, logic, and often math as we sort through the information we find. This game hinges on its ability to record information in a way that is easy to sort and read so that we can refer to it when we encounter a new lock.
Why is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes a brilliant puzzle game, if it doesn’t have a unique core mechanic?
Where the other puzzles depend on a core set of actions, this game depends on a different kind of mechanic. It is the information sorting system that becomes Lorelei’s brilliant photographic memory. The puzzle aspect of this game lies outside of the ‘actions.’ It is the words that form the details of the narrative. The interesting twists, mysteries, locked doors, and mind-bending ideas form the philosophical questions around identity and art.
On one hand, the puzzles evolve by giving us more to discover and track. This is an open-ended journey with multiple paths and puzzles available to solve at any time. Not only that, but since clues can be hidden anywhere, as well as hidden pathways, the entire environment is one large observational puzzle. So, you are constantly working things out.
The locks and environment puzzles become more complex as you go along. You start with common logic, math, and pattern recognition puzzles. As you go along, the clues get harder. We also begin to stumble across other types of puzzles, from memory to pattern recognition, mazes, trivia, and sometimes an unholy mix of all of them. It’s thrilling and constantly challenging.
The Verdict:
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a game on which I could write a thesis. It’s an amazing example of how you can make a brilliant game by using established puzzles but flipping the script on everything else. Thus creating something new and unique but still familiar. It’s a game that our team loved, as you can see from our review, and it is something any puzzle game fan should play, too.
