![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingBoxboy is thoroughly charming, and I loved it. Many of the gaming sites I read list it as one of the best games of 2015. I'm not sure how one would go about measuring such a thing, and I personally don't play enough new games to have an opinion, but this game deserves the hype.
Boxboy is able to teach the player its mechanics without becoming rote, and its puzzles are clever yet fair. Even the trickier ones can be solved with trial and error (as there are only so many permutations of the number of blocks allowed in each stage), meaning that the player is never going to become stuck or frustrated. That being said, there are more elegant ways of solving certain puzzles, which can net extra rewards. The rewards don't mean anything (although you can give your little boxboy a superhero cape), so there's no drive toward compulsive completionism. The game is innovative and delightful all the way through.
I really enjoyed the soundtrack, and I sometimes caught myself whistling it without thinking, which I'm sure was not at all annoying to everyone I work with. Eventually I set up a few of the songs on an infinitely looping playlist, which I've found works well as focus-inducing background noise for writing and editing.
It's kind of weird how much I love Boxboy and Thomas Was Alone. Back when Crispy's was trying to get money to develop Tokyo Jungle, one of the execs at Sony was worried that players wouldn't respond well to nonhuman player characters. I'm not sure where this was coming from, but I actually suspect the opposite is true. Namely, I think many players respond better to abstract avatars. It's the act of controlling the character that engenders affect; not the character's design. Although the design certainly helps, of course. I won't lie – Boxboy is ridiculously cute.
Boxboy is able to teach the player its mechanics without becoming rote, and its puzzles are clever yet fair. Even the trickier ones can be solved with trial and error (as there are only so many permutations of the number of blocks allowed in each stage), meaning that the player is never going to become stuck or frustrated. That being said, there are more elegant ways of solving certain puzzles, which can net extra rewards. The rewards don't mean anything (although you can give your little boxboy a superhero cape), so there's no drive toward compulsive completionism. The game is innovative and delightful all the way through.
I really enjoyed the soundtrack, and I sometimes caught myself whistling it without thinking, which I'm sure was not at all annoying to everyone I work with. Eventually I set up a few of the songs on an infinitely looping playlist, which I've found works well as focus-inducing background noise for writing and editing.
It's kind of weird how much I love Boxboy and Thomas Was Alone. Back when Crispy's was trying to get money to develop Tokyo Jungle, one of the execs at Sony was worried that players wouldn't respond well to nonhuman player characters. I'm not sure where this was coming from, but I actually suspect the opposite is true. Namely, I think many players respond better to abstract avatars. It's the act of controlling the character that engenders affect; not the character's design. Although the design certainly helps, of course. I won't lie – Boxboy is ridiculously cute.
