Patrick’s Parabox is an amazing puzzle game with a simple concept that grows over time in complexity, but always in a fun, logical way. I had a blast with it, almost beating all the included puzzles in the game and thinking about it for a while after the credits were over. It wasn’t -perfect- perfect, but it was damned close and I almost only have good things to say about it. Really good music and sound design too!
The core concept of puzzles is fairly simple, you start them all in some state, and you have to fill certain spots with boxes or your own character. In order to do that, you can move in all four directions to push things around, and that’s pretty much it. The game is very generous with undo/redo functionality and the ability to reset puzzles, so you don’t get screwed over by mistakes. The complexity of the game comes from the fact that the “boxes” you push around are often pieces of the levels themselves. If you exit a level, you might come out the side of one of these boxes, if you push a box into another one, it’ll enter another part of the puzzle, and so on.
The game plays with various systems, like the position you are pushing the puzzle pieces, some of them warp you, flip you, some levels make you part of the puzzle itself… The list of mechanics that are slowly trickled down goes on. The level selection is pretty neat, with puzzles organized in worlds with optional challenges peppered along the way. The only complaint I have against this game is that if you get to some mechanic that you just don’t understand, you might be able to blunder through the puzzles, but it’s decidedly less fun and you just rush through in hopes of something clicking or you being able to get out of that world. I managed to solve all the main game’s puzzles, but some of them were just mindless trial-and-error, at some point.
Play Patrick’s Parabox! It’s great! I won’t talk more about it, because the fun of solving each puzzle is the core of the game and I don’t want to spoil every single mind-twisting mechanic there is in the game, but it’s entirely worth it, what an amazing game.
