The goal of Wooden Path is quite simple: create a continuous wooden path from one bank of the river to the other. Accomplishing this goal, however, will have you racking your brain for a solution.
Wooden Path is a new puzzle game for the iPhone from bitroots, and it’s a great one for fans of sliding-tile games. On each of the game’s 74 levels, you’re presented with a screen showing various wooden bridges and other specialized blocks. There’s a light blue grid on the surface of the river that shows where you can slide things, and you move things around until you complete the path from bank to bank.
A slightly more challenging level, with teleporters, vanishing blocks, and more.
The early puzzles are quite simple, usually just a matter of sliding some blocks around and getting the bridges matched up. They teach you how the various types of blocks and objects work, but aren’t a real challenge to solve. For instance, there are teleporters that can be used to move blocks (and occasionally, rotate them). There are some teleporters which limit the color of blocks that enter them, and color the blocks that come out of them. There are star blocks which will vanish if all of them are in one contiguous mass, and some colored blocks which will vanish if you place matching-colored blocks at each of the portals. Some blocks can only be moved along one dimension, so you’ll have to work around those.
There’s a bunch of different other things that get thrown into the mix, but the result is a clever puzzle game that will give your brain a good workout. The level maps are set up so that you can approach the levels out of order: each time you complete a bridge, it unlocks all the levels that lead from that “island” to the rest of the map:
Level Map: you can skip around on the map and approach levels in a different order.
The interface is fairly easy to use, although I found that sometimes it felt like the objects were a little too easy to slide around. Objects will push other objects ahead of them, and it’s easy to slide things several steps past what you intended if they don’t run into an edge or other object. However, it’s a pretty simple interface overall and works fine. The other thing is that there isn’t any indicator of the move or time limit required to get 1, 2, or 3 stars on any given level. Nearly every single one I solved got 3 stars, even when I’d had hundreds of moves, except for one later level that awarded me a single star. Probably it would have been nice to have a better (or more clear) ranking system.
If you like puzzle games, though, Wooden Path has quite a few puzzles to keep you busy and it’s currently only $.99 in the App Store. It’s not as polished looking (or extensive) as Aqueduct, one of my other favorites, but it’s definitely worth a buck. And if you’re not sure, you can try out the free version first.
For more info you can also visit the Wooden Path website.
Disclosure: GeekDad received a free download of the game for review purposes.
