Unfolding the heart of games with Paper Trail
Trade body UKIE has maintained a lovely tradition for several years now: celebrating a UK Game of the Show at Gamescom.
The task of finding a winner has fallen onto GamesIndustry.biz for the past couple of years now, last year leading us to the wonderful Shadows of Doubt.
There were many worthy contenders this year again, but our decision went towards a title that channelled the perspective-shifting cleverness and striking visual identity of a Monument Valley or a Carto: Paper Trail, from Newfangled Games.
"The game is like a top-down puzzle adventure where the key mechanic is being able to fold the level that you're on," explains Newfangled CEO Henry Hoffman. "Each level has a front side and a back side. What's really interesting about that is when you fold over the front and the back, the two worlds merge together and you can use that to solve puzzles in interesting ways.
"We didn't realise at the time, but it gave us a whole bunch of really interesting paper-based mechanics. What's nice about that is it's got this top-down perspective, which creates these really interesting optical illusions and extra paths."
Hoffman is no stranger to perspective-shifting titles as he is best known for being the creator of 2016's colour-changing puzzler Hue.
"I've been working in indie games for 15 years or so," he says. "But the problem I found with the model that we were following is you start up a new company, you make a game, you have a publishing deal, you get some money that you can pay yourself back with, and then you wind down that studio and then do the same again. It became this cycle of starting up and closing down studios which I did for a while – we were able to sell the [Hue] IP [and] our studio [Fiddlesticks] to
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