Paper Trail

Paper Trail is a puzzle adventure in which the world is a foldable piece of paper. You play Paige, a young academic leaving home for the first time to pursue her studies. The central mechanic is folding the corners and edges of the screen to merge the two sides of the paper, joining paths together to open new routes.

What starts as a simple folding action — bring this corner of the screen over to that one — escalates into multi-step folds that twist, rotate, and overlap, demanding spatial reasoning more than reaction time. Puzzles never reuse the same trick for long.

The environments are handcrafted, ranging from underground caves to rain-buffeted treetops, with a stylised art direction borrowing from printmaking and watercolour. The presentation is flat by design — paper, after all — and animation work treats each fold as a tactile, physical event.

Characters Paige meets along the journey have short conversational arcs that flesh out the wider world. From Newfangled Games, the team behind several short experimental puzzle releases — Paper Trail is their most ambitious project to date, and reviewers have largely been generous with the folding mechanic.