Only Sliding

Only Sliding is a grid-based puzzle game about a little cube exploring a network of tunnels. The tunnel walls are packed with sliding-based puzzles you need to solve in order to progress. Only Sliding expands on elementary sliding-block puzzles, showcasing their full potential through surprisingly intricate and challenging tiny puzzles.

During your exploration of the tunnels, you will see puzzles engraved on the walls. They are inactive until you reach and land on the corresponding puzzle trigger, from which you can manipulate the puzzle's blocks. You just need to click on the blocks you want to move, one after the other, or on your character if you want to leave.

The little cube you control and the blocks in the puzzles follow one simple rule: when moving in a direction, they will slide and only stop when they hit an obstacle. The puzzles are very, very small and only feature a few blocks — usually two or three, but sometimes up to five or six. The goal is to rearrange and place them in the correct spots indicated by yellow markers. While all the puzzles are not mandatory, there is a minimum amount of them that need to be solved in order to open up the next tunnels.

The puzzle philosophy of Only Sliding is to keep the rules as simple as possible, the focus is on creating challenging puzzles with next to nothing. The game especially likes to put you in paradoxical situations; the blocks must be precisely positioned step by step in order to stop each other on the right spots, and it might seem impossible sometimes. It is pretty hard to anticipate everything, even when only a very few blocks are involved — the trickiest puzzles are actually not the ones with the most blocks.

The world of Only Sliding consists of four areas linked by a hub. The progression is linear but each time you finish an area, you unlock a shortcut that allows you to go back to it more easily in case you have missed or put a few puzzles off. There is also a secret world to find, divided into several individual parts. Each area houses one of the entrances which are indicated by a background block with the shadow of a duck on it (which can be extremely hard to spot as the background is very dark). Reaching the entrances requires using the blocks you unlocked inside the tunnels in ingenious ways. The secret world then provides additional harder challenges that explore new ideas and mechanics.

This description was written by Andréas Andrieux.