Alright, so first things first: BOXBOXBOY! does not solve any of my complaints that I had with the previous title. It is direct sequel to the last game not just in name, but in style, design, and gameplay as well. Not only do all of the mechanics from the previous entry return for an encore, but the central gimmick this time around—creating two different "stacks" of boxes—is actually the final ability you're taught in BOXBOY!'s postgame. BOXBOXBOY! fails to bring new ideas to the table, making it less of a proper sequel and more like a collection of spillover puzzles that HAL never got around to finalizing. This might sound like a harsh condemnation of the square boy's second foray, but there's one major upside that keeps the game from feeling vestigial: BOXBOXBOY! isn't afraid to get tough. And no, not simply "remove the kid gloves"-tough—I'm talking "brass-knuckled wallop to the jaw"-tough.
BOXBOXBOY! unfolds in parallel to its predecessor, introducing each mechanic to the player bit by bit across a similar sequence of linear worlds. Your new ability to make a second stack of boxes will keep the experience from feeling overly familiar, though most obstacles boil down to "make stairs with one stack, use the second to complete the puzzle." While the opening few hours of BOXBOXBOY! failed to impress me beyond a smirk here and there, none of the puzzles felt as slow or half-witted as those in the previous game. If anything, BOXBOXBOY! came across as a competent—albeit needless—remake of the first game.
Right around World 6 or so, you'll begin to notice some devious stage design and crown placement that might impede you for a few minutes. The puzzles will be tricky but not anything too taxing... until you reach BOXBOXBOY!'s relentless postgame worlds, where every other screen will have you muttering "how the hell am I supposed to do this?" World 14-8 and 16-5's crowns in particular were nasty, prickly little monsters that had me stumped for over ten minutes, and the penultimate level has one of the most cramped, soul-crushingly precise puzzles I've seen in a Nintendo game. There were dozens of other moments that had me massaging my noggin in despair, but that penultimate puzzle alone took me longer to solve than the entire final world from the first BOXBOY! That alone is worthy of some mad respect.
Yet despite the more stupefying puzzles, BOXBOXBOY! doesn't take much longer to complete than BOXBOY!—expect roughly five hours from both titles. This is because all your knowledge from the first game easily carries over into the second, letting you zoom through the early stages with advance techniques all while the game is trying to teach you pressing switches. And if you're feeling particularly naughty, every costume from BOXBOY! transfers over, including the speedy ninja outfit and bouncy bunny hood. In an interesting development, you'll actually need them for the costumed-specific challenge world, which locks you inside of these sequence-breaking suits and then tosses you through a gauntlet of old levels, where you're forced to finish them with fewer boxes than normal. The challenge world doesn't hold a candle to some of the postgame puzzles, but it's a neat twist to the regular formula that kept the spirit of the game intact.
And that spirit, unfortunately, is still dexterity-focused with a side of fiddliness. BOXBOXBOY! continues to grade players on their speed and thriftiness, which is a terrible combination in a game where you can't see the full level, you can't see a grid to measure distance, and you can place boxes on the very corner of a cliff to cut corners. I've already listed a bunch of grievances in my last entry so I don't need to recite them all—but don't worry, I've found more!
First: phantom boxes don't count towards the crown total, but will count when you're at "0 boxes left to use." Second: with a box attached to your hip, you can't jump and wedge that box into a one-square tall hole... unless you happen to hit a ceiling when you jump. Third: while having your legs dangle over spikes will still kill you, your legs won't dangle if there's a box you can snake to at the end of your stack. And lastly: while phantom boxes cause their corresponding corporeal stack to disappear, the phantom box will get made before the disappearance affects the world. That sentence might read like a brick of philosophical nonsense, but its a quirk that lets you grab the crown in 14-8 by using a phantom box to push yourself to safety before a switch de-presses and kills you. Trust me, if it sounds weird and stupid, imagine how I felt seeing it happen and having that sentence be the simplest rationalization I could come up with.
When it comes down to it, I'm not sure which of the two games I prefer. BOXBOY! has more originality and freshness, while BOXBOXBOY! sees the box mechanic stretched to its mind-boggling limits. The latter is a stronger puzzle game—and thus a easier recommendation—but it doesn't make sense without the introductory context provided by the first title—which makes it perhaps the better recommendation. Worse yet is that both games are bogged down by mechanical weirdness, which may not frustrate casual players but will feel downright ludicrous to those with an eye for elegant design. HAL did an admirable job building off of BOXBOY's base for its first sequel, but they only built the game vertically, recycling concepts instead of expanding outwards with clever new ideas. Hopefully with the next entry, I'll see a tasteful marriage of the first game's innovation with the second game's sharpness... because I don't have hope that the fiddliness will ever go away.
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Images obtained from: nintendo.com, nintendolife.com, gameinformer.com, macombdaily.com,
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