Slider

9/10
Look no further, the best puzzle game of the year is here, and it’s free!
What is it: A puzzle-adventure game centered on rearranging the world. Due to a global cat-astrophe, the world is broken apart into different pieces you can move around using the unique artifact in your possession. And to make things worse, your cat is missing! Embark on a fantastic journey to fix the world and rescue your cat.
There are nine different world regions you can explore, each with its theme and sliding mechanic. In each region you need to solve puzzles to recover the tiles of that region (called “sliders”), move the sliders around to solve more puzzles and recover more sliders, and assemble the whole region in the correct shape. While most, or maybe all puzzles involve moving the sliders around, they are all unique and very imaginative. The first world is deceivingly easy, and it mostly involves moving tiles to reach places, but it gets increasingly challenging and will soon involve assembling factories, organizing a party, artifact hunting through time traveling, fighting a TBS rock-paper-scissors war with invading aliens, cleverly cheating in speed racing against your arch-nemesis, and many other interesting activities. Each zone has its own theme: a simple village, dark caves, ocean, warzone, tree canopy, desert… And each zone has its own sliders mechanic: one is just moving them like in a 15-puzzle, one is like that, but they slide until they hit something, one leaves behind a ghost from the past, one has two layers so you slide in 3D…
You will need all types of “smarts” to play this game. Let me give you a few examples from the same zone. Your nemesis is challenging you to a game of elevensies, you must roll two dice to exactly 11 (5 and 6), but no matter how many times you roll, you always get the same insufficient result. The dice may be loaded, so how can you countercheat and win? You’ll have to realize that the dice keep changing when you move the sliders or drop the anchor, and notice how they change when you scroll vertically or horizontally or drop the anchor, figure out where the sliders need to be on the map, and what sequence of moves to use in order to change the dice to a five and a six. That’s thinking outside the box, trying and observing things, and math. You need to get your hands on a scroll fragment that is guarded by the bartender, locked behind a flip-up counter you cannot open. Seems impossible? You can now access the past, so what was the situation in the past, how can you combine the past and the present to get behind the counter and grab the scroll? Now you’re thinking with time travel. You need to melt a stolen safe using a laser beam reflected through the area. Can you find the right slider arrangement that puts the safe in the path of the laser? That’s observation and geometry. Such varied puzzles, and all in just the same area not even halfway through the game.
I think that the puzzles follow a nice difficulty curve from trivial to hard, but I’ve seen two complaints about this. It starts too easy, so people looking for a challenge may put it down before getting to the interesting bits. The puzzles get too big, soon you’ll need 10, 20, even 30 minutes of fiddling with the tools at your disposal trying to figure out which quest is doable next and how to solve it. I for one welcome the challenge. And after you beat the game the first time, there are even more challenges thrown your way as achievements. There are a few speed achievements, and a few skill/brains achievements, like making every recipe in the shape cookbook, solving the mines without ever stopping the cart, or winning the war without spawning all the troops.
This is a very creative collection of puzzles neatly assembled in a wholesome game. It’s smart, it looks good, it plays well, stellar both in content and presentation. Highly recommended!
How hard is it: Starts very easy and it gets hard by the end, especially if you want to get the challenge achievements.
How long is it: 9 areas, each with around 9 puzzles, expect more than ten hours of playtime.
Level design: Excellent, very varied things to do, all with clever solutions.
Quality: Very good. Good keyboard and controller support. Multiple save slots. Some settings, including some accessibility. Very good progress, speedrunning and challenge achievements. Fast and responsive.
Worth the price: I can’t believe this is free, it’s easily worth at least 10$.
Most positive aspect for me: Very varied puzzles.
Most negative aspect for me: Nothing to complain about.
Also consider:
Carto, very similar, with world rearrangement mechanic and clever puzzles.
Promenade, another year’s best, wholesome and with tons of varied activities, but as a precision platformer.
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It is quite amazing that a game that started as a 48h Game Jam event has evolved to a puzzle game of this scope! The game starts off with a very simple twist to the classic eight-puzzle game, completing quests to get more tiles, but subsequent maps/levels add more and more unique mechanics that make this game a delight to play! It is well worth putting some time into this game, I haven't seen a puzzle game like this in a good while. It is criminal that Slider is free. Excellent job, Devs!

Really good brainteaser. The mechanics are really interesting to tinker with to solve the puzzles

clever and creative puzzles
cute design and nice soundtrack
it's also completely free!!

Very cute game! The characters and world are really charming! The puzzles can definitely stump you at times, but just take some time to think it through and I'm sure you'll get them (at least that's what worked for me). This game definitely stands out with the whole world-being-a-sliding-puzzle thing. Very very cool!

I had to tap out on World 4 (of 9), but this game deserves love. It's a whip smart puzzle game and completely free. Honestly, it easily could be considered a rage game. The only difference is instead of not having the skills to get over it I was too stupid to make a band-aid with a square and two semi-circles on my first day at a treetop tech start-up (you have to play it to make sense of that). It reminded me of another clever black and white Zelda-like called Minit which I also enjoyed a great deal.
World 3 had my favorite gimmick and the World 1 song is an ear worm. Give it a try. You have nothing to lose except possibly your temper.

Chill little puzzle game all about sliding the world around. The crystal mines can burn in the depths of hell! That was a very tedious and boring section of the game it can do without. My only other gripe is the game is bugged. I left the factory trying to figure out what I needed to do, thinking maybe I have to come back later to finish it. I then did the military fight in the Flats and completed it at the same time as losing my troops. So essentially ending on a draw. By doing this my game became soft locked and I was unable to complete the game or progress any further unless I delete my save and start all over again.

What happened was The Flats section both thought I won AND lost. so the entire map reset to a blank map, while the NPCs were telling me well done! no go get the commander!....which I couldnt because the map was gone and couldnt be reset. The NPC who resets the map kept saying his winning text rather than lucky that was just a simulation or whatever. It was only after I finished the factory and looked up a walkthrough on youtube did I realise I was softlocked. And i'm not starting the game from scratch so it will now be uninstalled lol