Slider

Slider is a puzzle-adventure game in which you need to rearrange/fix the world and save your cat.

You’re certainly familiar with the sliding tiles puzzles. Slider uses the concept of this type of puzzle; each area usually consists of a 3×3 grid in which you can move the sliders (tiles) you find, allowing you to transform the world.
You start every area with 1 slider, you then need to talk to the NPCs and complete their quests to obtain the other sliders. The more sliders you get, the harder it becomes to rearrange the world as you’d like it to be.

If you don’t like this kind of puzzle, don’t worry. There are only 2 or 3 moments in the whole game that are annoying to execute, the rest is all about thinking.

What makes this game excellent is the variety and creativity of the puzzles.
The areas are not all the same plain old grid, they each have a special mechanic that keeps the world manipulation always fresh and fun to discover.
The quests perfectly exploit their area’s mechanic, and also offer challenges that require you to be purely ingenious.

The difficulty curve is completely linear. The game starts with an easy, classic first area and always becomes harder and harder. You can have multiple quests at the same time without knowing which one has to be done first. As the areas become more and more complex to manipulate, the quests are also affected.

I talked about ingeniosity several times, and it’s something I value greatly in puzzle games. Classic puzzle solving is good, but games that go beyond that and also challenge your ability to truly think outside the box are a rare occurrence.
It might be smaller in scale in Slider compared to puzzle games that use crazy meta stuff, but it’s still there and that’s something to praise, especially coming from a free game.

Slider is also incredibly well polished overall, not just the puzzles and that’s important to note: it doesn’t feel cheap at all and I didn’t encounter a single bug.
It would cost 10-15€ under normal circumstances, and it would be well worth its theoretical price.

A great, unique and creative game for the price of free, highly recommended.

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Developer: boomo
Publisher: boomo
Platform: Steam – Windows/Linux/macOS
Release Date: July 24, 2024