The best moment of a good puzzle game is when it rewires your brain and you suddenly feel like the smartest person alive. That moment when you’re looking at a puzzle and you’re like, “Oh… that would work!” and then it actually does and you feel great. but a great puzzle game should also be full of surprises. Just when you figure something out, it drops a new dimension or mechanic on you and starts rewiring your brain in a completely different way.
Not many puzzle games can achieve this, however Patrick’s parabox on Steam not only manages this, but also takes you on a trippy adventure.
Released on steam and itch.io on March 29th Patrick’s parabox (great name, btw) is a new puzzle game from developers Patrick Traynor and Priscilla Snow. In it, you play a cube that’s set in a strange world full of boxes in boxes in boxes in boxes in…well, you get the idea. This infinite matryoshka doll-like world of cubes gives Patrick’s Parabox its unique hook. On his website, its creators promise that every puzzle in the game “contains a new idea” and that there is “no filler”. A bold claim, but after spending a few hours on it Patrick’s paraboxit seems to be true.
The basic setting requires you to enter various hub cubes filled with puzzles. Some are mandatory for progression and others are optional, trickier challenge puzzles. All work the same. Inside you will find at least one marked zone where you can land and other zones where you need to place dice. Once all the zones are filled, you’ve solved the puzzle and can move on. And as you solve these puzzles, you’ll unlock new Hub Cubes filled with more problems to solve, with each hub tweaking existing mechanics or adding new ones.
For example, you learn early on that you can walk into some cubes if you push them against other cubes or walls. Later, you’ll use this to bypass barriers that would normally be impossible to overcome without the box-in-box mechanic. Then you realize that you can put other important cubes in these boxes. Then, even later, you discover that you can go into crates placed within crates that give you access to other crates, and then use this to complete a puzzle-within-a-puzzle-within-a-puzzle to solve. If all this sounds rather trippy and difficult to understand, it can be that at first.
Luckily, the game does a great job of never throwing too much at you at once, not until it’s certain you’ve mastered its latest new mechanic or idea. Even the challenging puzzles which are optional never feel unfair, they just test if you’ve fully learned a certain concept. And many times I hadn’t, until I jumped into a challenge room and discovered a new level of cube-in-cube madness in this minimalist puzzler.
Most of the gifs and screenshots you see in it are from the first 45 minutes of the game. I try not to spoil later puzzles or ideas because that would ruin discovering the numerous surprises and curveballs the game has planned for you, which is one of the best parts of it Patrick’s parabox.
If you want to switch off and lose yourself in some cute boxes and cubes, this is one to check out Patrick’s parabox. And if you usually play games in a chemically enhanced state, for example, you might find that the mind-bending puzzles featured here have a lot of mind-bending effects on their own.
