I’d planned on writing my next post about the Next Fest demos, but then I suddenly won another game on SG, so…

• Patrick's Parabox
  

  13 hours playtime

  21 of 22 achievements

Puzzle game. All you can do directly is move up/down/left/right and push blocks, but the game’s central premise is that some blocks can be moved inside of, shrinking everything that goes in and regrowing what gets pushed out. The premise is expanded further by having some blocks be duplicates of the play area, allowing for various recursion effects.

The game starts off great. The difficulty curve is very gradual, with many levels only being minor variations of earlier levels so you can get used to the minutiae and edge-cases of how the mechanics work…or at least that’s what I thought the game was doing at first. But then, you start to notice that the game is taking a really long time to start introducing harder puzzles, instead opting to introduce more and more mechanics and gimmicks. For the first 2-3 hours of the game, the most difficult puzzles only took around 5 minutes to solve, 10 tops. I was already starting to get annoyed at the “Clone” world, but the game kept introducing (and even abandoning) more and more gimmicks, and when I got to the “Flip” world and the game introduced yet another new mechanic, I started to wonder if I was the one being played. Some gimmicks are even only used for a few levels in an optional side path, so it’s not even like you have the implicit promise that the game will keep building on them like the other mechanics. There are even levels that replace the graphics with ASCII, and the entire challenge is deciphering which characters represent which game objects. Some levels also lock your ability to zoom in/out, which only serves to make levels more annoying rather than challenging.

Worse still, a lot of the challenge in later levels comes from the fact that there are so many mechanics, you either start to forget or were never taught about the minutiae or edge-cases required for their solutions, completely undoing the ONE potential positive its light difficulty curve could have had! It’s not like B.i.t. Lock or Klonoa: Moonlight Museum where you can solve puzzles you’re stuck on just by thinking about the level design and game mechanics after you’ve turned the game off; you NEED to do trial and error. This even extends to levels that are supposed to be easy tutorials, like the first level of the “Transfer” world, because the new mechanic is just different enough from how the rest of the game worked that you won’t be able to intuit its existence, only blindly stumble into it. If you’ve ever wondered how some people think the game is too easy while others get stuck on early levels, this is why. This game doesn’t have “aha!” moments; it has “oh yeah, I guess I can do that” moments.

However, I think the worst example of this mandatory trial-and-error are the first few “Infinite Entrance” levels because they hide crucial information until after you make it to a point-of-no-return zone that you can’t see from the main play area (not even if you zoom in or out). This is in stark contrast to every other level in the game (except Challenge 32, which has the same problem). The third level in that world even has an obstacle course in that zone, effectively guaranteeing you’ll have to reset the puzzle because you wont know what moves would screw you over until after you get there, at which point you’ve likely already screwed yourself over from not doing the specific setup needed to win before entering the point-of-no-return zone in the first place.

After you beat the game, you unlock an additional “Challenge” world and three “Appendix” worlds. The Appendix worlds each have their own exclusive gimmick that reverses a previously-established rule (e.g. entering a block has priority over pushing said block instead of vice versa), so you’d think the Challenge world would focus on testing what you’ve been taught in the main game instead of introducing even more gimmicks and never-before-seen edge-cases, right? Ha ha, nope. Some of the Challenge levels are decently tricky and some you’ll solve in just a few minutes like before, but those remaining ones go right back to testing your patience rather than your puzzle-solving skills. When that became undeniable after I solved Challenge levels 15, 24, and 37 (and tbh 32 as well), I finally looked up a walkthrough for one of the four remaining levels I had no idea where to begin solving: Challenge 4. Sure enough, it was more unintuitive, bespoke edge-case nonsense, so I gave up and left Challenges 5, 6, and 12 unsolved.

Overall, this is a good example of why I stopped buying puzzle games, no matter how well-made they seem or how well-received they are. It’s too easy for too long, and when it does get hard, it’s for the wrong reasons half the time. It does have plenty of fair, tricky puzzles the other half of the times it gets hard, but I cannot in good conscience recommend a game that I myself did not complete. At least wait until it gets a much bigger discount than what it’s been getting.