Origament: A Paper Adventure Review – Paper Parkour

You are a long undelivered letter, in an archive of the forgotten, and are given a spark of life by a mysterious and helpful cat. Desiring to be delivered, you enter a strange portal and find yourself in an unfamiliar world. You must now use your powers to change your shape to help you traverse this strange world and several others to find your way to where you were originally intended to go. In Space Sauce Studio’s Origament: A Paper Adventure you are a letter with the power to change yourself into four simple shapes: a crumpled up ball, a boat, a paper airplane, and a shuriken. The ball lets you move around on the ground and push objects, the boat allows you to speedily travel through water and other liquids, the shuriken gives you a burst of speed and can be used to hit and cut objects, and the plane lets you fly for a little while.

The goal in Origament is expressed very simply, use your four forms to navigate a stage and make it to the end of the level. This simple goal is complicated by the fact that each level is full of obstacles and hazards. That might sound redundant, but an obstacle blocks your progress, while a hazard sends you back to your last checkpoint. Both block your path, but an obstacle merely stops progress, while a hazard undoes it. A general rule of thumb is that if it’s red, it’s probably a hazard and must be avoided or attacked with the shuriken. But hazards do come in other shapes, like pits, mashing walls, and oil ponds, so keep an eye out. Level challenges range from safely navigating a speeding river, to flying through a series of updrafts to keep yourself aloft.

In addition to navigating around the hazards, each level also contains a multitude of collectibles in the form of coins. Each level has its own number of coins, and these can be anywhere from placed in the open, hidden in a secret alcove, at the end of a platforming section, or as a reward for completing an in-level challenge. These and messages in a bottle are secondary objectives for each stage, and the game keeps track of which ones you’ve found – though it doesn’t have a way of indicating which ones you have and haven’t found before if you replay a level. Each message in a bottle provides story flavor, while the coins can be used to unlock new skins for your letter, or origami instructions. Not new origami forms for the letter you’re playing as, just instructions on how to make the form, which while neat, is a sort of a missed opportunity to play around with say the style of airplane, boat and shuriken you can become.

In terms of story, apart from what I mentioned above, there’s not much of one. Each of the worlds you visit has some sort of story, with two in particular, Venice and the Wild West, having much more detailed and developed stories than the others. They’re also much longer and have multiple in-level challenges whereas all the others have only one, if that.

I also should address the elephant in the room that is that Origament only has eight levels, including a tutorial level. Venice and Wild West are by far the meatiest levels in the game, and could probably have been split into several levels without losing anything. The Wild West level could probably have been three levels for its scope and complexity, given it features three distinct segments. Venice likewise could have been split into multiple levels. One of my favorite levels had a vaporwave aesthetic and despite it probably being the shortest, it had some of the best and tightest level design of all.

Several levels had some other puzzle types aside from simply using the right origami form against an obstacle, like a block pushing puzzle in one level, and a three part key puzzle that required pushing three colors balls into corresponding holes in another. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded if every level had at least one of these just to break up the segments more.

Speaking of taking a break, the in-level challenges are quite fun and a good way to spice up a given level. Each of them involves navigating an earlier segment of the level you are currently in, but with a particular added objective. The two most common form of challenges are races, and a checkpoint challenge that requires navigating through specific points in the stage in a set order, with each checkpoint cross adding a few seconds to a quickly dwindling countdown clock. The third type, involving breaking a set amount of barrels, was not as common but was just as fun. Each challenge might also add extra obstacles or hazards to its course, just for an added bit of challenge to spice up what was an already familiar route.

I had an enjoyable, but brief, time with Origament: A Paper Adventure. If you’re in search of a well crafted good time, and are okay with it being a short, tightly crafted experience rather than a longer one, give Origament a try. If nothing else you can at least learn some origami techniques.

Tim reviewed Origament: A Paper Adventure on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.