Path-Making Games Get A Much-Needed Makeover
I find myself in the odd place of rooting for Afil Games, who have been a maligned publisher of late. They have been criticised, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly, of pumping out shovelware. They’ve been accused of repeating puzzle layouts within their puzzle games. But the last dozen or so games that they have released are in a state of invention. They’re constantly on the look out for new directions for old genres, and you know what? It’s a great look for the publisher.
Barkside Roads is very much of that movement. Its bare bones are taken from the path-making genre – games like Hexa Chippy and Crabwave. These are games where you have a main character and an exit, and the aim is to create a path to that exit. That path is made by rotating and swapping hex pieces, moving a crossroads piece to the centre of the grid, perhaps, and creating looping routes to your destination.
A Welcome Dose Of Ambition
These games are fine and I’d go so far to say that I enjoy them, but they’re getting a bit stale. Afil Games have churned out several in recent memory, and there’s only so much you can do with road pieces painted onto hexes.
Barkside Roads elbows its way in with some ‘what ifs?’. What if you didn’t have enough pieces to reach the end of the level? What if you had to find and unlock the pieces that might get you there? These are reasonably simple questions to ask, but they upturn the usual strategies, making Barkside Roads a far more interesting game as a result.
Not that you would know what to do when you first boot Barkside Roads. It is absolutely rubbish at teaching the player what to do, and the presentation – plus some of the tools – are frankly unhelpful. I have a theory about this: Afil Games have arrived at this point by making games that everyone knows and recognises, so they haven’t had to make things like tutorials. Now that they are making games that are trying something new, they’re fumbling their introductions.
All It Needed Was A Couple Of Text Screens
Barkside Roads doesn’t tell you what it wants you to do: namely, pathing to petrol stations (or what I think are petrol stations – the art isn’t particularly clear). These aren’t the end-of-level: the end-of-level is represented by the slightly easier to recognise finish-line. What the petrol stations represent, instead, is a box full of hex pieces. Stop at a petrol station, and you unlock a stash of new hex pieces to use. With more hex pieces, you can reach the next petrol station and so on. Eventually the finish-line might even be in sight.
This has a great deal of impact on how you play Barkside Roads. On a more macro level, you have a decision to make: are you going to head to the petrol stations or make a straight run to the exit? Believe it or not, this is a completely valid strategy, and I love it. You can bypass most of the puzzle in some instances, and you just need to recognise the opportunity when it comes up. A hot dog item acts as an optional objective to tempt you to try to find the longer route.
Then there is the case of which petrol station you head for. They are colour-coded (again, not tutorialised), and the colour informs you which hex pieces you will receive, since there is a sidebar where the pieces are shown. You might want to head for a petrol station that has a surplus of straight pieces first because, well, those are the ones you need.
Taking The Journey One Petrol Station At A Time
It also has the satisfying effect of breaking the puzzle up into nice, digestible chunks. If you’ve ever been overwhelmed by these games, and struggled to know which route to take, then Barkside Roads helps you out. You can baby-step to petrol station #1, then #2, and suddenly you are within reach of the finish line. The game feels more achievable and enjoyable as a result.
I wish there weren’t asterisks here, but there are. On occasion, Barkside Roads can be a real bugger to interact with. The petrol stations have paths in and out, but you can’t actually see these paths unless you hover over the station, which is unnecessarily fiddly. Choosing hex pieces from the sidebar is unutterably awkward, as the game doesn’t know whether you are trying to access hexes under the sidebar or the pieces on top of it. So it flip-flops around, confused and being mostly useless.
And then there’s the complete lack of an Undo or ‘Retry From Previous’ feature. Ugh, it makes me inwardly groan. Let’s imagine that you are at Petrol Station #2 and you want to path to Petrol Station #3, but you realise that a previous straight piece should have been a crossroads piece, so that you can loop round. Well, sorry bud, you are going to have to reset the entire puzzle and do it all again. There is no way of reversing choices, or undoing a simple mistake. If you crash your dog into a petrol station because you mistook an entry point, you have to start afresh.
Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks
It’s a bad taste in the mouth when so much about Barkside Roads is worth howling about from the rooftops. I haven’t even mentioned the frankly amazing dog-wiggle animation that plays when your car reaches the end of a level. Without these caveats, Barkside Roads might have even unlocked a higher score. I enjoyed the puzzles that much.
Barkside Roads is a good dog. It makes the path-making genre more accessible while adding many layers of strategy, thanks to some waypoints on the way to the destination. It’s a gentle reinvention but a clever one. But while it’s a good dog, it’s a shaggy one: there are plenty of presentation and usability issues. With a bath and a trim, Barkside Roads could become a standout puzzle game series on the Xbox Store. We hope it gets there.
Important Links
Barkside Roads Takes A Dog On A Puzzling Brazilian Road Trip – https://www.thexboxhub.com/barkside-roads-takes-a-dog-on-a-puzzling-brazilian-road-trip/
Buy, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/barkside-roads-xbox-series/9PHL4VQ2VJQ6/0010
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/barkside-roads-xbox-one/9P904J3L6TDW/0010
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/barkside-roads-windows/9PKGVKDPN1DV/0010
