An Undo Button Short Of An Inventive Puzzle Game
Afil Games have chucked a few path-making games our way on the Xbox Store. We’ve reviewed them too – games like Hexa Chippy and Crabwave, where the aim is to rotate and move path-pieces so that your character has a clear route to the exit.
In those reviews, we’ve often complained that they’re too freeform. You’re hardly ever rewarded for making the optimal number of moves. You get a thumb up for completing each level, which is often trivial, but you don’t get an extra thumb for doing it perfectly. There’s no real reason to replay each level to get it right.
A Puzzle Game For Neo-Capitalists Everywhere
Well, we should have been careful about what we wished for. We’ve learned our lesson. Pay to Path feels like it’s taken offence at that feedback, and promptly made a game to answer it. If you want to make a path in Pay to Path, you had better get it right first time because, if you don’t, you’re going to be out of pocket.
Pay to Path’s big idea is that swapping two path-pieces, or rotating them to another alignment, costs $$$. You start with a cash float, and it soon gets whittled down by your actions. Rotating one increment anti-clockwise? That’ll cost you $10. Removing a blockage from a piece? That’s going to set you back $25. You best ensure that every move you make is carefully considered.
A level will go something like this: your piggy bank character will be at one end of a series of hexes, and your goal – an open vault of cash – will be at the other end. In between, is your path – a jumble of straight, bent and crossroad sections. These can be rotated ($) or swapped ($$), while some of the pieces have giant bundles of paper on top. These confused us for a moment, but they turned out to be blockages ($$$).
Pinching The Pennies As You Path Your Way
Your cash kitty is visible in the top-left, and varies per level. You need to keep to budget if you want to complete the level properly. But if you want to complete it improperly, then Pay to Path has your back too. You can accept three different loans of $10 if you’re just shy of completing the level, or you can accept a hint, which overlays a path onto your grid. It makes the level trivially easy if you do, so use it sparingly.
I knew absolutely none of the above when playing Pay to Path. There isn’t a tutorial in sight, and the ‘quirk’ of paying for your actions wasn’t explained at all. It took me a few failures and a quick sprint to the Xbox Store description page to work it out. Hopefully we’ve helped someone to understand it.
The notion of creating paths with a budget in mind is a good one. We should say that, considering that we’ve asked for it in the past few reviews. It stops you from wantonly spinning pieces around, and encourages you to stop and think about what you’re doing. On more than one occasion, we forgot how clockwise and anti-clockwise worked, as we accidentally turned a piece the wrong way round and cost ourselves $20. Don’t be like us.
Suddenly what you swap becomes more important. If you need a straight piece, you’re not just grabbing the first straight piece that you see. Instead, you’re shopping around: is there a straight piece that would benefit from being swapped with the corner-piece you’re holding? Everything is more considered.
Map Layouts That Make You Think You’re Cheating The Designers
I like that Pay to Path is laid back about your solution, too. There isn’t a single way to complete each level. You can complete it in multiple, and it’s entirely possible to finish the level with an awful lot of cash left over. There was one level where we bypassed most of the hexes and ended up with $40 left over. Not that there’s anything you can do with that cash. You can’t pop into Costa for a panini with it.
But while Pay to Path is onto something with its mechanics (which, we should note, blossom out to include multiple pigs and vaults in the latter levels), it doesn’t have the controls and systems to support it. On more than one occasion, we wanted to chuck an armchair at the telly because it wasn’t helping us out.
There is no Undo button in Pay to Path. If you accidentally turn a tile the wrong way, you can’t step it back and turn it the right way. The only option available to you is to cheat/get a loan (which isn’t in the spirit of Pay to Path), or reset and try again. Similarly, if you think that you’ve found a solution, and pressed X to confirm it, only to find that you were wrong – well, you’re stuffed. You can’t go back and tinker with the layout to fix the one element that was incorrect. You have to reset and build it all again.
It’s Not What You Do, It’s The Way You Undo It
These come up frequently enough to be a pain. It’s not hard to imagine a kind of pay-at-the-end feature, where you build up a running total, with the ability to Undo moves at any point, and then commit to the amount when you’re happy. That feels like what Pay to Path needed: a kind of sandbox capability that lets you plan and tinker, rather than fail and reset, fail and reset. That would have kept the difficulty, while not necessarily making you feel bad.
Overall, Pay to Path is a step in the right direction. There’s been an effort to take the path-making genre and give it a shake. Adding a budget and paying for your moves makes you think differently: suddenly you care about every action. Plus the genre was getting stale. Adding some freshness was absolutely needed.
Pay to Path is just a step or two shy of achieving its aims. There needed to be Undo features, perhaps a sandbox mode, for it to play smoothly. Without them, Pay to Path has too many pain-points. It makes you pay, financially and in terms of your patience, a little too often.
Important Links
Pay To Path Puts A Price On Every Move – https://www.thexboxhub.com/pay-to-path-puts-a-price-on-every-move/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/pay-to-path-xbox-series/9ntxmswdfdls
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/pay-to-path-xbox-one/9nxjx0pmv8jl
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/pay-to-path-windows/9p47s3v2qnzf
