I like to think that, having been supplanted by autoshooters and twig-picking survival games as the Steam Next Fest genre du jour, 2D puzzle-platformers can circle back from ubiquity to becoming cool and clever again. In any event, I’ve definitely enjoyed As I Began To Dream, a charmingly hand-drawn side-scroller that delivers its puzzles with a tactile clickiness straight out of your childhood toolbox. The demo is out now.
You are Lily, a vaguely Princess Kaguya-lookin’ young girl with the power to flip, rotate, and swap square chunks of scenery. At first this is more of a build-your-own-platforms exercise than a basis for actual puzzles, but soon you’ll be umming and ahhing over which tile goes where, in which orientation, and whether you should be teleporting yourself along with it. Especially when shadowy enemies and laser emitters start showing up, and your panel flips become weaponised as much as they are about traversal.
Still, these puzzles never demand that you juggle more than two or three tiles at once. I don’t know if the full game will expand them in scope, but I actually appreciated how compact each individual challenge felt: I was never stuck on a tricky arrangement for long, and even when I’d ham-handedly spun the components into an unwinnable situation, resetting (which can be done at any time) meant I barely lost any time or progress.
I suspect the fact that Lily is stationary during all this – all that flipping and reversing is performed with the power of her unknowably Gen Alpha mind – means that this won’t necessarily gel with those who like their puzzle-platformers to more closely meld the thinking and hopping parts. In a way, though, this worked just fine for me. One issue I consistently have with these kinds of games is the sluggishness, where even when I can see the solution to a puzzle, I need to endure the labours of tedious crate-shoving and rope-pulling to put it into effect.
Planet Of Lana livens up this process by giving you a cute yet competent monkeycat partner to share the work, while As I Began To Dream simply doesn’t bother with it, allowing you to manipulate the tiles with instant taps. The result? With the exception of some later puzzles, where you’ll need to watch some little monster baddies walk into the doom you’ve crafted for them, there’s almost never a delay between that precious “Eureka” moment of solving a puzzle and the moment of its execution.
The full game’s challenge will be maintaining this immediacy and snappiness over what will, logically, be a series of more difficult and intricate puzzles. But given how well the demo does at making its tile swap games feel good, I’ll happily give it the chance.
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