Shnik is what happens when you click an object and slide it along a path. Well, that’s what solo developer Little Crown Games has decided anyway! I like a portmanteau, and this allows Shnik to describe itself in one word. It’s a simple, budget-tier puzzle game that feels a bit like a slider puzzle meets the board game Rush Hour.
Each of the 75 levels is a wire mesh with various pastel coloured blocks placed on top. These blocks are either single squares or blocks that look like xylophone bars, as they have two black dots on them. These are the catches that attach the blocks to the wire grid. The goal is to move your circular bead to the red circular goal by moving it across the wire grid, but all of these pastel blocks are in the way. Initially, the game starts out like the board game Rush Hour, moving blocks around like a giant slider-puzzle maze, allowing the red circular bead pass to reach the goal. As levels progress, you’ll have rotatable pieces of wire mesh to create a moving maze, and also moving platforms that you can slide along tracks to move pieces, too. To add complexity, later levels add keylocks to puzzles, requiring a bit of logic progression to solve mini puzzles before you can even move the red bead at all.
Where Shnik gets its name from is the control scheme. Each block can be clicked, then flicked in a direction along the wire. The block slides along until it hits either the end of the wire or another block in its path. It’s oddly satisfying to fling these blocks around, but it can lead you to dead ends and unwinnable scenarios where you’ve Shniked your bead into a dead end that it can’t be salvaged from. Restarting a level is simple, but there is no undo feature. Thankfully, if slider puzzles are your mental kryptonite like me, there is a skip level feature. That allows you to continue on the game and return to puzzles you didn’t complete later. I truly appreciated this, as I find slider puzzles either click or don’t for me, and a second viewing is often required!
I enjoyed playing Shnik. It is laid-back, soft, pastel, and yet cleverly designed. Some levels are simpler than they appear, and a few have multiple ways to win. The tactile approach to moving blocks is appreciated, and for a budget title, Shnik has a cohesive design that just works well together. It won’t change your life, but it isn’t meant to. This is the perfect Autumn afternoon cookies and cocoa game for the brain.
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