BOXBOY! is a neat game that's tethered to some unfortunate... eccentricities. While suffering through the merciless Snakebird, I needed something to play before bed that could give my poor brain a pat on the back. I remember enjoying BOXBOY! back in 2015 yet had left it curiously unfinished, so I started a new save file and dove in. Sure enough, HAL's humble adventure worked well as the polar opposite to Snakebird: it was slow, mechanically diverse, and extremely easygoing—I can count the amount of times I was stumped on one hand. But it had one other quality, one that most other puzzle games try to avoid: BOXBOY! was fiddly.
In BOXBOY! you play as the eponymous boxboy, who extends boxes out of his body and can detach them at any point to form bridges and staircases. You might be fooled into thinking the game plays like a 1-D Sokoban clone, but there's a lot more to BOXBOY! than mere switch-pressing. There are conveyor belts, cranes, portals, circuits, gravity lifts, and lemming-like enemies that you must guide safely to a device (which happens to be a compactor that crushes them, ironically). Each mechanic has its own "world" devoted to it, gently introducing you to the gimmick one puzzle at a time. Only at the end of the game will they combine together to form more devious stages, the worst of which are entirely optional postgame content.
That means for the most part, BOXBOY! is a cakewalk. Occasionally you'll run into a stiff challenge that might seem physically impossible on first glance, but your options are always surprisingly limited due to the set number of box permutations you can produce. That means the solution is never far from hand, as reckless experimentation can often net you a lucky victory. BOXBOY!'s difficulty curve reinforces its laid-back nature too; expect less of an uphill climb and more of an EKG monitor, where any spike in difficulty is often followed by bafflingly simple stages you can puzzle out at a glance—even in the postgame levels. While I have no qualms against easy puzzle games (Hook and Zenge can be quite meditative), BOXBOY! treads a fine line between being clever and dull, with its easier stages often sliding into the latter.
One optional goal that adds a decent challenge to BOXBOY! is collecting crowns. Each level has one or two crowns that the player (usually) has to go out of their way to snag, with the catch being that you have a limited number of boxes to reach them under. That means that if you come to a spot where you need four boxes to reach the crown but only have three, you'll either have to puzzle out an alternate pathway or restart the stage with the aim of being more efficient with your box placement early on. While this sounds like an interesting limitation to play around, this is unfortunately the start of the dreaded fiddliness.
The first problem with this is simple: just where is the crown? A single stage will stretch across multiple screens with the crown often hovering near the end, but you won't know precisely where it is until you physically get there. That means that you won't know if you're using too many boxes until you reach the exact screen with the crown, and the only way to reset the limit is to restart the entire stage. And since you can be given you a limit of 30 boxes or more (one stage gives you 45!), you have no clue at all if you're being efficient with your boxes until it's often too late.
This might sound like an annoying problem for the game, but a good 80% of BOXBOY! is extremely generous with its box limit. Sometimes I would reach the crown with three boxes remaining, or six, or even double digits. Most of the time the limit adds no pressure, but that makes it far more noticeable when you run into a punishing level that's easy to solve but absolutely brutal with its box limit, requiring perfect play from start to finish. Like the difficulty curve, the box limit is unpredictable in that it occasionally spikes out of nowhere and then doesn't matter at all in the next level, giving some bizarre whiplash to an ostensibly quaint game.
Which brings me to the next fiddly issue, and arguably the bigger one: BOXBOY! is weirdly reliant on execution. Having a challenge about using as few boxes as you can sounds like a logistical conundrum, but you'll soon realize there's ways to bend and manipulate this limit. Boxboy can only jump one square high and two squares across—but you can actually make it three squares across if leap from the edge of a ledge. While occupying a one square wide platform you can't create boxes on the same ledge with you—but you can drop them next to you, effectively creating stairs and bridges where there shouldn't be. There are unlockable costumes later on that change the speed you move and height you jump at, further bending what's possible in both box limitations and puzzles. Lastly, and weirdest of all, is that boxes that extend out of boxboy don't count towards the box limit until you let go the Y-button, allowing you to interact with certain stage gimmicks without generating "real" boxes.
That last point—which I call "phantom boxes"—is a weird quirk among many that BOXBOY! expects you to understand and utilize by its end. Another that always bothered me is that boxboy is technically 1.5 squares tall because he possesses legs, meaning you can't enter into a 1-square high corridor—unless you use boxes to push yourself in there, at which point you can shimmy in and out. Another is how "snaking" works: at first it seems intuitive—it's kind of like a grappling hook where you pull yourself to the location of your final box—but like shimmying, it only works when you're stuck. That means if you want to get atop a high platform, you have to come up with a contrived way to get boxboy stuck so that the snaking prompt pops up. Note that none of these problems are game-breaking or too niche to comprehend; they're just unintuitive skills that feel like they follow arbitrary logic. They don't feel like new rules as much as they are bizarre edge cases that you're forced to learn—they're fiddly.
Nothing captures the problematic quirkiness of BOXBOY! better than an experience I had in one of the postgame levels: there's a group of spiked conveyor belts boxboy needs to ride to the exit, while also keeping a box above his head to block a laser on the ceiling. So I extend boxes out from boxboy's right side and curve them up around his head, creating a little dome where he can safely ride across the spikes to victory... except that since boxboy's legs dangle, they interact with the spikes and kill him! So you might assume I have to put a box below his feet to stop that, perhaps turning the dome onto its side... except that one time I was able to get across the spikes unharmed with the original configuration. Why did it fail five times in a row but work on the sixth? I don't know. And saying "I don't know why I won" is something you never want the player to admit in a puzzle game of all things.
It's so strange how BOXBOY! expects you to solve puzzles with a degree of platforming finesse—I mean, what was the last puzzle game you played that had unlockable time trails and marathon runs? Catherine? Portal? Yet if you play BOXBOY! that way, it begins to creak and jitter, too imprecise to be a platformer yet too demanding for a box-placement puzzler. I might just be overcritical; BOXBOY! remains plenty of fun, offering about thirty minutes of playtime per dollar spent on it. But I'd hesitate to call it a must-play, or even smart. It's cute—true—and occasionally clever, but it's just too frequently fiddly for my tastes.
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Images obtained from: wikipedia.org, theverge.com, modernwarfare7.com, nintendolife.com, nintendo-europe.com
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