A Fold Apart

A Fold Apart is a cute, origami, paper-folding game. You play as a pair of lovers, a red and a blue, though you choose their sexes. It tells of their long distance relationship issues, starting with them meeting, getting along, becoming a couple, and then the blue goes out to be an architect. Not just to be one, but to move to another country to build a place’s landmark on contract. At that point the game starts proper.

The story of the game is done through text messages between the couple as well as inner monologues each character has. From what I’ve seen the text options only change some flavor text but that’s it, they are really cute though. The inner monologue is done either in the walking sections of the game between puzzles, or during the puzzles themselves. At first the puzzles are simple in that you just fold the left or right side of the screen to make paths, but later on they start letting you fold from the top and bottom, the corners, rotating the screen, and even having some platforms disappear if they’re folded. There’s no real worry about messing up in this, you can fail but it always just restarts you at that puzzle.

Most of the puzzles aren’t too hard, but there are a couple difficult ones as the game progresses. The biggest hurdle is that all the buttons that are needed for everything are all right together. “What? Are you stupid? That is great.” I know that’s what you’re thinking, but you’re fucking wrong. A and D make the characters move, F grabs blocks, then Q and E flip the page over, R resets the folds one at a time in order, and T allows you to rotate the page with Q and E. I don’t know how many times I pushed a wrong button in the later stages cause all the buttons are all right next to each other. I don’t really know how to solve that, but that’s a lot of buttons all next to each other. While this can be good for people who want to play one-handed and the like, it’s kinda hard to play if you’re not used to playing like that. Maybe it’s just a me thing since I’m a console gamer so I’m not used to having buttons all right next to each other on a keyboard.

The graphics in the game are absolutely adorable. Between that and the oragami concept I was hooked when I saw it… fuck where did I even see it in the first place… it was like over a year ago at this point though I think. Just waiting for my chance to request it this whole time. Finally got it, and I’m pretty pleased with it. My only real issue with it other than the keys, which can be remapped, which I’m just too lazy to do, is that the game is so short. It took me about 2 and a half hours to beat and some of that I left the game to go eat, unload a dishwasher, and do some cleaning while I was downstairs. I hope they plan to fix this by just making another one, the ending left off with the prospect that there couple be a future sequel, or maybe DLC, who knows. I hope they do though.

All in all, it’s a good, albeit short, game with beautiful graphics and a unique gameplay style. I’m extremely pleased with this game and I’m a bit sad that it took me so long to be able to play this.

A Fold Apart was developed by Lightning Rod Games.