I detest slider puzzles. There is something about them that just drives me up the wall. I think it’s because you can often see the solution but you have to move things around 50 million times to get there and it feels arduous to complete.
Enter Trupki – a slider game focused on mini puzzles with twists to solve. I can’t believe I’m saying it but I actually enjoyed playing this slider game!
Trupki has a few neat ideas. Normally slider puzzles keep you in a contained area but in Trupki you can move rows of tiles horizontally or vertically and what moves off the edge appears on the other side like a screen wrap. Trupki’s early levels are all built around this concept as you need to replicate the shape on the top half of the screen with limited moves on the bottom half. You cannot make any other complete shapes in the process and you cannot use more than your allocated moves. This means as a player, you’ll be thinking about how to shortcut moves by wrapping the blocks around the level edges.
From there Trupki adds additional tricks. Square blocks can’t be pushed off the edge of the levels and get in the way. Arrow blocks signal that a row or column can only be pushed in that direction. Circle blocks rotate all the blocks in whatever else is being moved with it so it can wildly warp what you can make around. On the easier difficulties, you’ll usually deal with one of these or some of the other blocks that crop up later on. Then as Trupki ups the ante across three difficulty levels, you’ll get more blocks, with more special blocks in the way, meaning you’ll have far more room for error.
There are 300 levels in Trupki and thankfully you can tackle them in any order you like. That’s handy because some levels early on stumped me and yet I could some harder levels easier because my brain could work out the steps to rebuild the shape. I did run into a few issues where the game didn’t seem to save my progress though, meaning I’d have to redo levels multiple times for it to register. Trupki is also clearly built for mobile and then ported to Steam. All the UI mentions touching the screen and crucially the game only runs in a small mobile-shaped portrait frame. This was a bit annoying for me as it made the game difficult to screen record but it also meant I couldn’t just view the game and have a clear background to increase my focus. There is also a hint system that explains how to solve a level but I have no idea how to gain new hints. It worked twice and then never appeared again no matter how many levels I completed.
It is a shame there are rough edges around Trupki because the core gameplay is interesting, the levels are fast initially and the extreme difficulty levels are hard and satisfying to complete. It’s cheap too. Fans of obscure puzzles will likely enjoy this far more than anyone else. That said, if you don’t mind the lack of full-screen options and enjoy a slider puzzle, this might also scratch your itch too.
Review copy provided by the developer. Out now on Steam.
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