The pantheon of super-cute, super-tough puzzle games can welcome a new member. Woim deserves a place alongside the heralded greats of recent years, the likes of A Monster’s Expedition, A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build, and Bonfire Peaks, and yet not a friend of Draknek appears to have been involved. Woim is the work of dogspawn.net, a one-person studio, and it’s in the same sweet spot of being super-difficult and making you feel like a genius when you solve things.
Woim is a bizarre fusion of Snake and Sokoban, a 2D block-pushing, worm-growing puzzler. Things begin fairly simply, with rules about negotiating the earth-walled mazes and eating apples to grow your worm long enough to be touching a switch and going through the gate it opens at the same time, without getting stuck in a corridor or trapped by your own pink booty. There are 50 puzzles here, and as much as I’d like to pretend I’ve already finished them, look, it’s really hard, OK? Mechanics change as you progress, and the game is never so rude as to think you need any of it explained. And crucially, you’ve got a rewind button, so you can experiment as much as you like until you figure out what you’re supposed to do with mud, or eggs, or jigsaws.
You’ll need that “undo” button, too, and it’s an unlimited, ever-generous option that lets you rewind every move you’ve played in a level at excellent speed, taking away that agonizing feeling of having found yourself trapped in a dead end and being forced to restart. Zipping back as far as you need, perhaps before you ate that one extra apple that made you too long to escape a looping tunnel, ensures things always feel like they’re progressing, not resetting.
And then there’s the first time you get chopped in half.
This is what makes Woim so delightful, the way it springs new elements on you rather than handholds you toward them. It’s a game I felt like I was experiencing rather than being led through, which feels splendid. It’s a cheerful, lighthearted presentation of some incredibly well-constructed puzzles, and without a glimmer of smugness.
Defying gravity
It turns out I started playing Woim on some sort of artificially induced super-high difficulty, because due to some sort of glitch with my Xbox controller, the game was constantly pulling me downward as if I were fighting gravity in its top-down 2D underworld. This, it seems, was not intended, but I’d like to pitch it as a feature for a sequel, because it caused all manner of interesting techniques to be needed. I almost reviewed that game, the one I thought this game was, and while I had some very serious issues with how you’re supposed to pull off some especially tricky moves, it kind of all worked! Someone make that game too; apparently I’ll give it a lot of praise.
In the meantime, the actually intended version of Woim is fantastic, too! And for $10, you would be a dreadful, slithering creep to object.
Woim is out now on Steam.
