Pixel-art puzzle adventure Slider has released on Steam this week, boasting a big world full of characters and locations and problems to solve. The game's been getting some attention since it won Best Student Game at the 2023 Independent Games Festival. Best of all, it's 100% free.
As the name suggests, the core of Slider is a mechanic of sliding big chunks of the world around on a 9-panel grid ("The Artifact"), shifting their locations relative to each other and rearranging the geography in ways that will presumably be useful for solving puzzles and generally getting around. Here's the overview trailer:
The story here seems to be that some big bad event has broken up the world, and the denizens need your help putting everything back where it goes. (Plus you need to find your cat!) The game boasts 9 different worlds or regions, "each with their own twists."
From the trailers and screenshots it's clear there are a whole lot of different styles of puzzle being thrown into the mix, giving me the impression Slider lands on the side of "adventure game where you'll see many new mechanics over time" rather than a game hyper-focused on digging deep into one type of logic. Even the titular world-sliding interface seems to get some changes and twists, the consequences of which are fun to imagine.
I spend a lot of time playing smaller free games, but Slider seems to be a properly commercial-sized quest, apparently clocking in at 10+ hours. You can get the game on Steam now totally free.
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