A Shrewd Evolution of Sliding Puzzles, Albeit a Little Lacking in Charm
The well-oiled machine over at Afil Games has produced yet another top-down puzzler, this time in the form of Damways. But rather than being a sokoban, crate-pushing game, it’s a sliding puzzle game with a difference.
Damways casts you as a beaver that’s just looking to return to their lodge. But the beaver’s brakes don’t seem to be working, as every move they make up, down, left or right sends them sliding across the lake in that direction until they hit a wall. We’re a little worried about the beaver, as swimming seems like a basic function they should have a handle on.
Slide to the Left, Slide to the Right
It is, of course, the ingredients of a sliding puzzle game. You have a playspace that’s basically a grid of squares, and you can tap in one direction to slide. You don’t get to tell the beaver when to stop, though: you have to wait until it hits a wall. Only then can you slide in a new direction. With these very limited tools, you need to reach a goal – in this case a beaver’s lodge (nature hot tip: a beaver lives in a lodge not a dam).
For the opening few levels, Damways is very much the standard sliding puzzle. You have a basic grid, with some nobbly walls here or there. You can slide into these walls to your advantage: they might put you level with the Lodge, and now you can reach your goal.
It’s a few levels in before Damways gets interesting. Planks of wood start appearing in the grid (again, nature hot tip: planks are not naturally occurring in the wild). You can slide into these planks. This now gives you the ability to tap LB and choose a direction to place said plank. That plank becomes a dam, and you can use that dam as a wall. If you couldn’t reach the lodge before, you might after you have placed a suitable blockage.
Frankly, My Dear, I Can Make a Dam
Damways becomes a kind of DIY sliding puzzle. You don’t have to work with the walls you have been given: you can create a few of your own, as long as there are a few planks to work with. You can even use planks to access further planks, creating an escalating set of dams that gets you closer to beavery victory.
It makes you think differently. With a traditional sliding puzzle, you can kind of bumble your way to success. Keep tapping the d-pad until you get into a position that looks advantageous. But there’s no brute-forcing with Damways. You have to reverse-engineer a path to the lodge: what dam, in which orientation, will let me reach my goal? When there are multiple planks, this becomes even knottier. Which series of walls will get me home?
Damways could have been a conventional sliding puzzle, and we would have shrugged and moved on. But this elegant addition makes Damways so much more interesting. I found myself planning the level rather than feeling it out. And that made it something else entirely.
There’s a neat graduation to the difficulty, too. Damways lets you come to terms with the new mechanic over several levels, then hands you an additional plank. It lets you come to terms with that too, before moving the lever further and increasing the difficulty. Roughly halfway through, once the achievements and Gamerscore were exhausted, I started to feel stumped. There are fifteen puzzles here that all play on that fine line between difficult and impossible.
Putting the fun into Functional
If there’s a criticism, it’s that the build-your-own-walls mechanic grows repetitive over time. Part of the problem is that the dam-making sucks a little interest out of the puzzle design. The layout needs to make room for potential dams that the player builds, so the arenas don’t have the complexity and dead-ends of your average sliding puzzle game. Damways ends up feeling a little simplistic as a result.
Damways also feels like it needs something else – a partnering mechanic or two – to really keep the interest. It feels unfair to criticise a budget puzzle game that dares to innovate by saying ‘it could innovate more’, but I can’t help feeling that about Damways. By the twentieth level or so, I felt like the idea had been played out. I wanted something more, beyond just layering on more planks.
I wondered what Damways might have been like if you could build more than just walls, for example. What would happen if you could build conveyer belt squares, or portals? There’s definitely room in this direction, and Afil Games – who love a sequel – could use this as a jumping-off point for further exploration.
Even with these caveats, Damways nicely passed the time. As a budget puzzler, it’s got a clear concept – sliding puzzles where you build the walls yourself – and it focuses on making tight, well-made puzzles within that framework. It just hasn’t got much in the way of razzle-dazzle, as it’s more functional than inventive.
For the low price of £4.19, Damways does get you thinking outside of your box. That might be enough sliding puzzle shenanigans to make it worth your while.
Important Links
Build Your Way Home In Damways – https://www.thexboxhub.com/build-your-way-home-in-damways/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/damways-series/9pnhj76pz138
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/damways-xbox-one/9p9s69f9m41s
Or buy a Windows PC edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/damways-windows/9pcnh8qg7br8
