A Sliding-Puzzle That Might Be The Best We’ve Played
I really should pay more attention. My assumption was that Slide Viking was another sokoban, box-pushing game from Afil Games. They make a crazy number of them, lining the Xbox Store with crates. But there was a clue in the name: Slide Viking is a sliding puzzle, not a sokoban, and that’s a rather large difference.
A sliding puzzle has you sliding from one side of a room to another, only stopping when you hit a wall. Slide Viking, in very basic terms, conforms to those rules. You’re a viking head (no viking body – perhaps that’s what you’re looking for in the treasure chests), and you’re sliding on the ice. Only walls and spikes stop you, and you definitely don’t want to be stopped by spikes.
Sliding Into Your DMs
The task is to reach a treasure chest in each of Slide Viking’s 30 levels, but that’s not always simple. As is customary with sliding puzzles, it’s difficult to find yourself in the right nook or square that will lead to the chest. You can only move up, down, left and right, after all, and that means navigating yourself into the right position.
Usually I am merrily tapping away on the controller, moving my character into a variety of positions to see what works. But Slide Viking demands a little more thought than that. Not only can you get yourself stuck in corners, you can get killed by spikes. So, there’s a degree of care that isn’t usually in a sliding puzzle game.
They’re not the only deviation from the norm. Slide Viking also likes a spot of keys and locks. Except, rather than keys, they’re axes. Pick up a red axe, and all the red blocks in the level will disappear. Green axes clear green blocks, and blue axes blue blocks. It’s a simple addition, borrowed from plenty of other game genres, but it’s a top notch inclusion.
Suddenly you’re not just thinking about how to get to the chest, you’re thinking about how to get to axes too. That’s complicated by their order: if you gather the green axe first, the green blocks disappear – and those green blocks might have been the only way to reach the red axe. The order in which you claim the axes is suddenly a factor, and the permutations for completing the level skyrockets.
A Slippier Customer Than We Expected
Not going to lie, I thought Slide Viking would be ultra-conformist and not do anything particularly new. That’s me making assumptions again. Because Slide Viking is probably the best sliding puzzle game I’ve played, and the one that takes the most risks. I’m racking my brain for a sliding puzzle game that I would slot above it in either category.
Sliding puzzles are usually pretty one-dimensional. You’re looking for a path to the exit, and that often means reverse-engineering the answer: how can I get there using the blocks and walls that are in the arena? Slide Viking slams an axe into that concept. It’s multi-dimensional. You’re not only finding paths to up to four different axes and treasure chests, you’re wondering which order to collect them in.
If that sounds like it might be too difficult, introducing too many permutations, then you’d be right. It could have been too difficult. But Slide Viking stops just short of being overly challenging, and tinkering with too many different factors. In some levels, it doesn’t matter which axes you collect first. In others it does matter, but it’s immediately clear where you went wrong and how to account for it.
Afil Games are always very good at Undo and Retry features, so there’s always a means of getting out of the hole. And once you’ve realised your mistake, you can go about reverting it and then solving the whole shebang.
A Bitesize Puzzling Treat
If your experience is like ours, there will be a sense of fluidity to the experience. Each level is a sequence of puzzles – getting from one axe to another – but they are bitesize puzzles individually. It allows the player to break each level up into constituent parts, and – in our case – that meant a flow as we moved from one problem to the next. You’re very rarely standing still in Slide Viking.
Are there any foibles? Eh, not really. I will concede that it’s short. At thirty levels, with each level taking about a minute, you’re not getting the longest experience in the world. And while it may be the best sliding puzzle game that I can recall, that bar isn’t particularly high. In puzzle game terms, this is hardly The Witness or The Talos Principle in terms of sophistication, so you will need to allow for a certain simplicity.
I keep changing the score at the end of this review. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a sliding puzzle game, which is reason enough to give it a 4. Considering Slide Viking is £4.19, that’s a commendable achievement. But it’s also not that remarkable in broader puzzle terms. While it adds some locks and keys to the usual sliding puzzle formula, it’s an idea that you will have encountered many times before. Maybe it’s a 3.5 after all.
I like to be an optimist in these situations. The devs have truly cared about Slide Viking, and there’s almost no chance that you will dislike your time with it. A 4 it is. Let’s spread some joy about the world.
Important Links
Sharpen Your Axe (and Your Brain) with Slide Viking – https://www.thexboxhub.com/sharpen-your-axe-and-your-brain-with-slide-viking/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series consoles – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/slide-viking-xbox-series/9pm4fd28zwsx
There’s an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/slide-viking-xbox-one/9p25x5lc0pf2
And one for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/slide-viking-windows/9p12pcqj568p
