Local Paper Small Town
Firewood Games · 2022 · Escape Room, Local Co-Op, VR, Hand-drawn, Investigation
PC
Positive87% · 23
This game is free to play. Get it on Steam →
Screenshots
About Local Paper Small Town
Local Paper Small Town is a 2-player co-op puzzle game about spreading happiness around a quirky papercraft town.
Team up with a friend, using a physical newspaper and VR, to discover Smalltown and its charming cast of characters by communicating and relating between both formats.
One player explores the town in VR, solving puzzles by moving cardboard cutout characters around, entering codes, and working with the second player to fill in their newspaper crossword puzzle and deducing each character's story and place in the game world. The second player, equipped with the PDF of the Smalltown newspaper, reads and scans pages for clues that may help both players advance the game state by solving puzzles in VR thanks to their shared understanding of the characters, similar to a collaborative escape room, but with more narrative flavouring.
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How to play:
In this two-player experience, one player is equipped with a newspaper from a fictional Canadian town, and the other player explores a papercraft version of this town in virtual reality. Please find the newspaper PDF in the game folder.
Have fun in Smalltown!
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Created as a mixed media semester project at the Cologne Game Lab. Nominated for the Ubisoft Newcomer Award at the German Developer Awards 2020.
Team up with a friend, using a physical newspaper and VR, to discover Smalltown and its charming cast of characters by communicating and relating between both formats.
One player explores the town in VR, solving puzzles by moving cardboard cutout characters around, entering codes, and working with the second player to fill in their newspaper crossword puzzle and deducing each character's story and place in the game world. The second player, equipped with the PDF of the Smalltown newspaper, reads and scans pages for clues that may help both players advance the game state by solving puzzles in VR thanks to their shared understanding of the characters, similar to a collaborative escape room, but with more narrative flavouring.
* * *
How to play:
In this two-player experience, one player is equipped with a newspaper from a fictional Canadian town, and the other player explores a papercraft version of this town in virtual reality. Please find the newspaper PDF in the game folder.
- This game is for two players: one with the newspaper, one playing VR.
- The game lasts about one hour, and is best played in local co-op with a speaker for both players to hear the audio.
- Be sure to communicate well with your partner to solve puzzles, discover character stories, and complete the game.
- VR player: In addition to teleporting, you can grab characters and move them around to solve puzzles.
- Newspaper player: The game was designed to be played with the newspaper player not seeing the game screen. However, if you prefer to have an easier time, you could check what the other player is seeing in VR.
Have fun in Smalltown!
* * *
Created as a mixed media semester project at the Cologne Game Lab. Nominated for the Ubisoft Newcomer Award at the German Developer Awards 2020.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Local Paper Small Town is one of literally thousands of student projects infesting Steam. While student projects tend to be better quality than most "amateur" made games, we must still question what value such projects have for gamers. As with all student projects, this isn't really a fully fleshed out game, it's just the result of an academic exercise, and as such it has much more limited value as a game than a professionally developed game would have. Educational institutions should not be using Steam as a dumping ground for homework assignments (especially if the students didn't even pass the course). Sure, it helps their marketing and helps the students feel good about themselves, but this is another case of a business putting themselves before the needs of gamers. This student project follows through on a unique game idea... now, I said unique, I didn't say "good". You need two players, one with a VR headset and the other looking at a PDF you have to download. The PDF is a newspaper, like a clue book, and the players need to talk to each other to progress through the game. It's all a bit tedious, really. The graphics aren't great, low poly "paper" art shaded assets, a…1 found this helpful
It was meh. Took less than an hour with the wife. Probably 30 minutes if you don't screw around too much. It's free, so don't expect a lot. It gets very laggy (Quest 3). Interesting idea, but can't recommend. Unnecessary gay propaganda.1 found this helpful
Fun little free puzzle game.
AMAZING GAME! make more please! great puzzles, great artstyle
Going to have the ending song in my head for a while! 😆 we had a blast.
Such a good game. We really enjoyed it. It's intuitive but makes you think. Done within two hours with small breaks.
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