Piano creeps in and trumpets growl as the sun rises on another puzzle in Please Fix The Road. Sunlight pours over this miniature diorama, which I destroy and twist and rebuild until, once the road is fixed, its figurines pop into fireworks and the whole set splits and morphs into the next.
Please Fix The Road reviewPublisher: Ariel JurkowskiDeveloper: Ariel JurkowskiPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC
The presentation adds almost cinematic flair to this delightful puzzle game. Yet though it might look wholesome, Please Fix The Road is actually a fiendish little thing.
On the surface it seems simple enough: as the title suggests, you just fix the road right? Slot in a couple of curves, join up the dots and voila! Cars, boats, cows and the like intersect and then reach their intended flag destination.
Wrong! There’s more to this than simply dropping the right tiles in place. The solution might seem obvious, but the game dictates to you what tiles you can use and in which order, significantly increasing the challenge.
And while some puzzles give you sections of roads – curves, straights, slopes and more – to slot into place like a child’s train set, others give you more manipulative tiles. There are bombs to destroy before you rebuild; rotating tiles; move and copy tiles; tiles that shift a row in a certain direction; and all of these come in set sizes or Tetris-like shapes. It’s the use of these tiles that really adds creativity to each puzzle solution.