Slider

PC, Mac, Linux, free

There’s a rule in video games, as dictated by the mighty Richard Cobbett: If you put a sliding tile puzzle in your game, you must be encased in concrete and buried at the bottom of the sea. It was, until this week, a very strictly enforced rule, but suddenly everything has changed. Slider, an inexplicably free puzzle adventure, is set inside a sliding tile puzzle.

This mostly black-and-white pixel puzzler takes place in a series of 3×3 grids, where you gradually unlock tiles by solving puzzles. You usually start on a single tile, your little Forager-looking guy chatting to the locals, exploring his surroundings, and also capable of sliding the tile to any position in the larger grid. Complete a puzzle, and you’ll be gifted one or more other tiles, which you can then rearrange such that you can walk from one to the next, chatting to more people and getting more puzzles to solve.

Eventually you’ll unlock eight tiles for the area, at which point, rather than working out how you can slide the pieces around to arrange the world in the order you need at any given moment, it converts to an old-fashioned sliding tile puzzle. Here, you most likely need to wrangle the grid to get every tile in its correct place so everything lines up, and then the ninth tile will appear and the area is complete.

If that sounds complicated, it is! And it only gets more so, with elaborate puzzles in later areas that require you to align tiles such that machines can work, or create routes through which you can sail a raft, or make paths so NPCs can find one another. The puzzles are many and varied, often never repeating, with the Slider constantly innovating on its own central conceit. Which is extraordinary! Which only makes it far more peculiar that this game is free!

There’s one level where you’re arranging the tiles such that a series of shape-producing machines in a second layer in the treetops will work together to build items for a collection of NPCs in the world below. It’s stunningly complicated, especially when you’re at the point of trying to combine five different shape items, using duplicators, all within the larger conceit of these tiles on the grid. And then that’s it, that entire game concept complete, and it’s a whole other set of challenges in a whole other area.

I cannot fathom why this is free. I even asked the developer, Daniel Carr, and he sort of shrugged and said he wants as many people as possible to be able to play it. So, take him up on this!

• Boomo
• Steam
• Free
• Official site

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