I’ve been looking for Steam games that have got zero reviews to see whether or not they’re hidden gems that deserve a little bit of love and attention.
One game i think falls into this box is Trupki and it’s a slider and connect puzzle game with some really tricky level design because you’ve got limited moves to complete each level.
The idea is that you’re given this pattern or shape that you need to replicate that’s on the top half of the screen colored in by solving the puzzles that’s underneath, and I traditionally don’t really like slider puzzle games but trip key does things differently.
This slider puzzle works almost like a slot machine because most of the levels have to be solved by pushing things off of one Edge so that it appears on the other so as you push blocks and move them all up the top one will reappear at the bottom the left one. If you push them all left will appear at the right hand side of that row or column.
So you’re constantly about how things wrap around and fall outside the box, that’s all very well for some of the early levels but as you go through the 300 was in this game it then adds in additional mechanics such as square blocks that can’t be pushed of the edge.
You’ve got Arrow uh keys that will only move rows, or columns in the direction that the arrows pointed then you’ve got what i call like the Rotator block and it works a little bit like teacup rider where you can spin around. The axis of what a specific block on te hat row is whilst you move the whole row left or right or column up and down.
So it really plays with your perspective of how you can manipulate parts of the puzzle to redo the design. There’s also other things like you can put in like a twisty knob so that it rotates around everything like a giant circle around the edge of it, and the more of these that get put into the puzzle and the more they interact with each other.
The further you can get from the actual right answer by trying out lots of different Maneuvers as you try to recreate the shape above and that’s really the beauty of trip key. It’s really elegantly designed it’s got nice clean interface everything, just works my main problem with trip key is that it doesn’t have any kind of full screen mode or anything like that it pops up.
Blatantly built for mobile and touchscreen first because all of the UI and the instructions is like tap the screen and I’m like I’ve got a mouse. But outside of that it did just mean that the UI is quite small when you’ve got a whole screen for a PC to play with and it will only use a small Slither of the screen because it’s built in a mobile frame.
If you can Overlook that though trip key could well be a juicy little Puzzler for you to while away a couple of hours on trying to think outside of the box by wrapping yourself around it.