Paper Trail (PC) Review

Join Paige as she embarks on a very personal journey. She wants to pursue further education at a college, but her parents want her to stay home. After explaining that she can control space in a mystical way, her need to make her own way in life puts her on a path where she leaves home in the dead of night. This power to shift reality by folding the area like paper means that she can problem-solve for her family and community in a unique way. At the beginning, players learn the ropes by helping out family and friends in the local community by fixing, bridging and otherwise bending the areas for the better. As she explores away from home, she meets an eclectic cast of characters and usually ends up helping them out in some way. It's a magical little adventure full of heart. It's really easy to get invested in the story and its presentation really helps this.

The story is fully voice-acted cutscenes, which are progressed by folding the images in the right ways to move the scene forwards. It's a nice way to fold (pun intended) gameplay into the storytelling to help get players involved. So, how does this folding power work? Firstly, this game feels great to play with a mouse, as clicking and dragging is its most natural form of control. Each level and interactive cutscene is split up into rectangles or squares with interactive points at the sides and corners. It's the player's goal to bend this "paper" to complete paths for the main character to progress, and Paige is being moved by simply pointing and clicking. This ranges from as simple as folding the page in half to folding in corners to align with patterns in the background or to complete numbers bridges that only activate once the right numbers intersect. It's deviously simple yet incredibly complex at the same time.

The game has a solid learning curve, not too fast and not too slow. It naturally introduces new elements to puzzles. For example, things like moveable boulders may sound like a very simple thing but once players start having to move them over folded paper and realise they can no longer unfold it until the boulder is cleared… it's a really good way to add difficulty without changing the mechanics. Obviously not everyone can easily do this kind of visual puzzle work so players who need it can press "H" for a slider that shows the next fold in the sequence. This hint system is helpful and non-game breaking so it's good stuff. In terms of other powers, the main other "ability" of Paige is to see through the paper to the inverse. This is great for planning how to solve a page but still requires some visual thinking about how the back translates when folding the paper.

Paper Trail also looks fantastic, the colour palette is killer, it gives it all a really dreamlike visual style. Characters all have a nice, simplified look to them - almost like a picture book, with a nice range of designs but none of them complex or unmatching. The world is similarly pretty with lots of nice flourishes and animations that give it just enough life to stay visually alive with ripple-y water, breezy trees and other little environmental flairs. It's genuinely lovely to explore even in its more muted moments. Areas tend to lean on one particular colour, occasionally being changed up to signal progression. This is most obvious in areas that feature reds, which are uncommon at the beginning where it relies on a lot of muted purples, greens and pink highlights. Basically, it's a really great looking title with a uniqueness that also permeated Hue; the director just nails visual styles every time!

Sound design also deserves a mention. Voice acting during the voiced segments is really nice, it has the feeling of a story being recounted to the player and the tone of voice fits perfectly well with the dialogue and type of story on display. Paige's voice actor does a fantastic job. In gameplay, voice work is replaced with N64 style burbles and grunts which are different for each character in the game; it's charming and manages to avoid being grating even in longer dialogue sequences. The same can be said of the soundtrack which carefully matches the story scenes and levels by providing that "dreamscape" feel but not being afraid to add a little bit of tension or emotion when necessary. This is usually stitched into the environmental sounds, like stormy weather in story scenes, offering some really impactful storytelling.

All in all, Paper Trail is a great package. It offers roughly a seven to eight hour journey with some extra content to provide more replayability. Each level has origami to collect, hidden in the folds that require some out of the box thinking to detect. Getting these is optional but can be a fun challenge for those brainier players. As a final bit to mention, the game also has a handful of helpful accessibility options that allow for players of most abilities to play the title, which is much appreciated!