Paper Trail Review

Paper Trail is an awesome and unique puzzle game. I’m so impressed by the looks, the puzzles, and the execution. It has missable achievements, but the game is short. One of those missable achievements is a speedrun achievement.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 7 hours without a guide, 2 hours with a guide
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1, but I would suggest 2
Is there a good guide available: I wrote this achievement guide , which also contains links to a youtube playthrough to get all the collectibles
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, there are 3 missable achievements (speedrun + complete the game without hints + one at the beginning of the game)
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: Yes, complete the game in under 4 hours. I highly suggest doing this on a second playthrough so you can just take your time and enjoy the game the first time around
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting, but it has an achievement to complete the game without hints
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Wow, I’m blown away but how beautiful and creative Paper Trail is. The gameplay is so unique and done in such a wonderful way while it will also ask you to think deeply about how to solve the later puzzles. I love how you play through different theme levels and how they all add a new mechanic to the already creative gameplay.

What makes this game extra good is how it saves automatically at the start of each new puzzle, so you can just quit the game and come back later to a puzzle when you feel stuck or had enough for that moment. It allows in such an elegant way to play this game in short bursts.

furthermore, it is also impressive how the game had no bugs for me. I’m quite good at breaking games and it is quite normal for me to contact developers about breaking X or Y so it can be fixed soon. However, I didn’t encounter any bugs at all in Paper Trail!

Paper Trail has a few missable achievements. The most notable ones are for completing the game in under 4 hours and for not using the hint system. The tutorial will ask you to open the hint menu but as long as you don’t use the slider in the hint menu when the tutorial force you to open the menu, you’re fine.


I highly recommend playing 2 times through the game, the first time without worrying about the time and the second one as a speed run. By then you already know the answers to a lot/ all puzzles so it goes a lot quicker. The timer is also very gentle, as in theory, you need less than 2 hours to complete the game.

I give Paper Trail 4,5 out of 5 stars.

This review for Paper Trail was written on 16 May 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 35 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.