Slider is one of those games that’s charmingly absurd in every way. Its main gimmick, being able to slide pieces of the world around, is absurd. The fact that it’s completely free, and is packed with around a dozen hours of stuff to uncover, is absurd. The places it takes you - from the pirate-infested high seas to a robot vs alien war - are all absurd. And, finally, it’s just absurdly good fun.
Beginning life as part of the 2021 GMTK Game Jam, Slider might pull you in with its two-tone, GameBoy-era pixel art and a pledge that cats aplenty will appear (a promise it fulfils), but its seemingly simple intro is deceptive. This puzzle adventure kept me hooked for hours by layering in new, unusual ideas, and expanding on old ones, for its entire runtime.
Back to basics. You play as a little pixelated blob guy and one day, the world mysteriously fractures, and everything except the chunk of land that your house sits on disappears. You only leave the house to get the cat back in, but lo and behold, you soon discover powers that let you reform the geography and rejig the world like a jigsaw puzzle.
If you’ve played Carto or this year's Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure, the central idea here won’t be too alien. Slider has you adventuring around top-down levels, helping people whose lives have been torn apart. Using your sliding power you can rearrange your way through the nine levels’ world maps, usually set on a 3x3 grid.
Puzzles are sort of inherent in that concept. One tile might only be accessible from the south, meaning you’d need to place another piece underneath to get there. One talkative fish might ask you to connect the waterfall on the top-left of the map to the ocean on the far right, which is more of a jigsaw stumper. ‘Romeo’ and ‘Juliet’ might be looking for one another - “lest I drink this poison” - meaning you’d need to place their blocks directly next to the other.
It’s a neat gimmick that could most certainly make for a cool, clean, creative two hours of thinky brain teasers. But Slider isn’t simply content with being a “good idea, right?” kinda game. Lead developer boomo — together with a team of collaborators from their local college club, VGDev — constantly revamps the game’s central premise for everything it's worth, remixing its rules at every level.
The cave biome, for example, introduces fungus that only retracts at the sight of light. So now, rejigging the world doesn’t just affect how you navigate, it affects how much each tile is submerged in shadow, it affects what direction the light comes from, and how much of the fungal rot you can move through. Learning a levels new system is like seeing the game through a new lens, or a different filter. It dramatically shifts what you’re prioritizing through this geographical redecoration and further complicates a (sometimes already) very messy map.
Slider doesn’t take a dramatic left turn just once, though. The pirate level, for example, doesn’t let you slide tiles at all, you instead need to rotate them using four levers. Then there's the Impact Zone, an area where all the tiles move in the same direction, rather than having one move at a time. And I won't say anything of the completely bonkers end-game stuff for fear of spoilers, dear reader (even though the Steam page sort of mentions some of it anyway if read carefully shhhh).
Relearning the rules can sometimes be quite intimidating, but if you get properly stumped, boomo and his collaborators have also crafted the game's very own online walkthrough that’s linked to Slider’s in-game main menu, which breaks down every challenge. As a former guides writer who can now geek out and play games normally, I was super happy to see hints included alongside the plain old solutions, so it gently nudges you off in the right direction without completely spoiling the puzzles.
My only minor gripe with the game is that it lacks a quest log, because you’ll sometimes be bombarded with requests that are easy to quickly forget about, and the lack of fast travel (at least from what I’ve played so far) since familiar backtracking can sometimes detract from Slider’s biggest strength: the joy of constantly oohing and ahhing at the sight of a new discovery.
But how much can I really complain when Slider is this consistently creative, this big, and this, well, free? Easily one of my favourite games of this whole year, Slider stands out by never resting on the laurels of an already clever premise. Boomo and co. know that sliding the world around is cool, but somewhere along the line, they must have realized that what’s even cooler is doing it in nine wildly different ways.
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