I have a peculiar relationship with sliding ice puzzles. Sometimes, I can see how everything’s meant to slot together perfectly and I absolutely adore them. Other times, I get in a muddle and curse them as the worst things ever created in the history of video games.
You know the sort I’m talking about. Where you launch forward onto a floor of (usually) ice (though not always) and your character won’t stop moving until you hit some kind of obstacle directly in front of you. Often, these puzzles task you with pushing blocks around them, too, either to hit switches or create new pathways when they fall into holes and such. Zelda has loads of ’em. Older Pokémon had them. Even Mario’s indulged in them from time to time.
But the Steam Next Fest demo for Sliding Hero asks: what if the entire game was one huge sliding puzzle? It’s an idea I’ve never really considered before, as sliding puzzles are usually just tiny parts of a larger whole. But you know what? It kinda works!
Honestly, they must have buffed the floors and gardens of the 1700s Venetian villa you’re stuck in like nobody’s business for hero Luca to glide across them so effortlessly, but the results make for a surprisingly serene traversal experience. Even though you spend a lot of time mashing your face into pillars, bushes, benches and (strangely modern-looking) lampposts, I found myself quietly compelled to keep pushing forward into this faintly cursed setting – honestly, some of the plants could just have easily come from the dark world gardens in A Link to the Past, and that’s before we get to the giant eyeballs glaring at you from most of the trees, and the giant Virgin Mary-esque statues occasionally coming to life and delivering cryptic messages to me out of a well.
The slightly protracted way Luca moves might seem laborious at first, but as you start to encounter some of the villa’s more dangerous inhabitants – skeletons, zombies, big exploding flesh monsters and the like – the sliding all becomes part of its wider puzzle. When you encounter enemies, for example, you must defeat them all before you can progress to the next part of the garden. But simply bashing into them with your tiny sword won’t do much (or any) damage once you start coming across monsters that can defend themselves, so you’ll need to make clever use of the other, limited use items you find out and about. A mace, for example, can shunt enemies away from you – allowing you to get them into better positions in order to hit other nasties you’ve got to deal with – while spears can jab them across holes, and épée swords let you pass through them so you can bonk or punt them from the other side.
It’s really quite neat once you get the hang of it, though Sliding Hero could benefit from a more immediate room reset option (or just a basic undo button) for when you make a mistake or break a weapon too early. It took me a while to realise that running over green portals on the floor does, in fact, give you the power to restart a room – as opposed to navigating back to the purple ones that reset it manually), but having to hold down a button and wait a few seconds for it to kick in is still a little tedious after coming from the instant redoes of the sokoban-meets-Witness-like Isles of Sea and Sky (which I started playing last week during my hols – it’s very good! Would recommend!).
Still, hopefully there’s time for a bit of extra (floor) polish here, as Sliding Hero isn’t set to come out in full until 2025. Until then, do consider giving its Next Fest demo a go – I was pleasantly surprised by it, and I’m still thinking about its weird, eyeball-infested gardens even now.