The upcoming puzzle-adventure game Paper Trail has been on our radar for quite a while now—it's even accrued an impressive number of awards and accolades pre-release at various expos and industry events. With a new trailer, it's been announced that on May 21st you'll finally be able to set off on this journey, guiding a young woman through a pretty, origami-esque world that can be warped and folded. You can see this feature in motion in the new release date trailer below:
The key mechanical draw in Paper Trail is this ability to grab and "fold" corners and edges of the game world, peeling them back and revealing a new hidden layer underneath, which can intersect and connect with paths and puzzles on the screen. It's one of those ideas that feels very intuitive as soon as you see it in action: grabbing a corner of this colorful, hand-painted world and folding it over, seeing the newly revealed section of path filling in a gap, allowing your character to cross the divide.
A number of puzzle elements have been shown off, including sliding blocks, rotating platforms, bouncing light-beams and symbols that must be pieced together, and the trailers have me imagining how many interesting ways all these ideas could be combined with the central "folding" mechanic for a variety of (hopefully) interesting puzzles. The game's page also emphasizes a wide world with a unique cast of characters and "long-lost secrets" to uncover.
Paper Trail lands on Steam on May 21st alongside a range of other platforms: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Playstation 4/5, iOS and Android. The game will also be published with Netflix on mobile platforms, meaning that Netflix subscribers will get access to the game with their subscription for no additional cost.
You can wishlist the game on Steam now to be notified when it launches, or try out the demo any time you want. The game's official website also features more info and visuals to peruse. For a deeper dive, you can check out our video where Joe chats with the Paper Trail developers about the making of the game while he plays.
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