Blackwood Crossing

I have a soft spot for small studios making their first real swing at something emotionally ambitious, and PaperSeven's debut does exactly that. Blackwood Crossing puts you in the shoes of Scarlett, a teenage girl chasing her younger brother Finn through train carriages that keep dissolving and reshaping into something stranger: a treehouse sprouts in a passenger car, grass replaces the floor, a child in a rabbit mask dissolves into confetti when you get too close. The surrealist scenery changes are genuinely striking, and the art direction leans into vibrant, almost storybook colours that sit in strange, productive tension with the themes of grief, guilt, and growing apart. Finn is the heart of the whole experience, and the writing around him earns its place. He wears a makeshift superhero costume with a big letter F on it and bosses Scarlett around via an early Simon Says tutorial that doubles as a neat way to learn the controls without breaking the spell of the world. As the story unfolds across four small environments, puzzles ask you to sequence conversations between masked passengers, assemble broken ornaments, create paper butterflies, and unlock a family cipher using a secret language Scarlett and Finn invented as children. None of these are taxing, which is clearly a deliberate choice: the puzzles exist to slow you down long enough to absorb the emotional weight, not to test your lateral thinking. Later sections introduce two minor powers, the ability to breathe life into objects and to manipulate fire, which nudge the magical-realist tone further toward something genuinely eerie. Dialogue choices allow you to respond to Finn as bossy, gentle, sarcastic, or angry, though these selections are cosmetic rather than branching. The honest negatives are real and consistent across critical reception. Scarlett walks with a slow, slightly lurching gait and there is no sprint option at all, which becomes genuinely punishing during sections that send you back and forth across the same corridors. The interaction reticle is fussy and often requires precise, patience-testing positioning to trigger prompts. One early photo-cipher puzzle lacks enough in-world context to feel fair. These are friction points that a slightly more polished release would have caught, and for players whose patience runs thin with walking-sim-adjacent mechanics, they will chafe. The whole runtime lands somewhere between two and four hours depending on your pace, and some critics found the conclusion rushed even at that length. What I keep coming back to, though, is the soundscape and the restraint. The score by Lowrider Sounds works quietly in the background, shifting register as the train slides from playful afternoon light into something unsettling without ever announcing itself. The British voice cast is uniformly strong, and Finn in particular is written and performed with a specificity that most games miss entirely when depicting children. If you carry any personal history with sibling distance, or loss, or the strange guilt of growing up faster than someone you love, this game has a way of finding the exact bruise. Comparable touchstones would be Dear Esther, Among the Sleep, or the quieter chapters of Life is Strange: if those landed for you, Blackwood Crossing belongs on your list. If you need agency and systems, it will feel like an expensive short film with annoying controls.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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