Developer Sunhead Games

Publisher Humble Games

Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One

Release Out now

See those mountains? Yes, you can go there. But why not bring them over to you instead? The horizon is never far away in Sunhead Games’ compact but big-hearted puzzler, which gives you powers akin to a god - or a level editor. As the eponymous young adventurer, you shift and rotate tiles on a map, before slotting them next to others with which they share a similar border. It’s a game with no need for a fast-travel mechanic, not when you can lift up the chunk of ground on which you’re standing and plonk it down closer - or even immediately adjacent - to your destination. It’s done in the most unshowy way, too: this is the equivalent of tectonic plates colliding, or small islands coming together to form new landmasses, and yet the power to change the world completely is held within but a few button presses.

The conundrums are often quiet little marvels, regularly prompting cheerful epiphanies and rousing surprises

Over the course of a brisk six-to-seven-hour story, designer Lee-Kuo Chen - previously responsible for A Ride Into The Mountains and criminally underplayed martial arts adventure The Swords - consistently finds creative ways to explore this idea. It starts simply: when asked to locate a hut in the middle of a forest, you first need to make sure that forest has a middle. The curves of a meandering stream are easily rearranged to form a circle. Other navigation-based challenges don’t have a single fixed solution, with several pieces letting you forge your own route to a particular place. If you can’t find a neat way to make the world fit neatly together, you can just grab a couple of pieces, walk from one to the next with its more convenient borders, and then drag it where you need to go. That said, there’s a certain satisfaction to finding the most efficient solution, and a late-game quest rewards us for tidying up each part of the map before we depart to a new biome.