This new concept gives BOXBOXBOY! a certain amount of freshness early on, but after the mechanics start to become second nature, unfortunately the true potential never feels fully exploited. Sets of blocks can be stacked to give your box/boy hybrid higher steps to scale, ceiling switches can be hit by raising one set of boxes up with another like jacking a car, and snaking through a narrow passage that leads to a bottomless pit is no longer a problem when the perfect floor can be formed and pushed on out before taking the plunge. Now solutions must be found via combinations, forcing the player to approach situations from a different perspective. This may not sound as sexy as Mario getting a game-breaking cape or Link finally learning how to jump, but the opening tutorials demonstrate the immense promise such a seemingly minor change can have to the established formula. The new angle to BOXBOXBOY! is that now Qbby can create two strings of boxes that can be used independently of each other. These actions will be pleasantly familiar to anyone who embarked on the first adventure, and while that game exploited them quite thoroughly, there is still much satisfaction to be had in the execution of a leap of faith to grab a supposedly unreachable ledge or conceiving the perfect configuration to connect switches and open the door barring your little parallelogrammical guy’s route to victory. Whether set down in the shape of straightforward stairs to allow access to greater heights, placed over a chasm or tossed atop deadly spikes to form a bridge, or constructed as a barrier against buzzing laser beams, the incredible utility of these plain, ordinary cartons is limited only by one’s own inventiveness. How one gets there depends largely on how those boxes are manipulated. The gist of of BOXBOXBOY! remains basically the same as its predecessor: using Qbby’s power to create a finite string of boxes (which resemble lifeless clones of his own body…), players are tasked with running around on those little twig legs and platforming a path to each level’s exit. Nintendo’s cleverly-titled BOXBOXBOY! fulfills at least one of those destinies, and while the magic of initial discovery may have worn off, it’s still hip to be square. While its tetragonal protagonist, Qbby, is as two-dimensional as they come, his adorable nature and the refreshingly unique mechanics used to to navigate through the many bite-sized, brain-teasing stages of his angular world meant that mascothood and a sequel was only a matter of time. By Patrick Murphy Embracing the puzzle game philosophy of deriving complexity from simplicity, 2015’s BOXBOY! for the 3DS was a charming surprise, what felt like a side project from the folks at HAL Laboratory, born out of passion and whimsy while on a break from mega-franchises like Smash Bros.
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March 2023
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