fucking what

Boxes: Lost Fragments (PC)

I hit a funk these past few days, and little sorts a funk quite like getting to fiddle and tinker with something that makes satisfying noises and provides tactile responses. Some neuron in me has filed that description away for later use for something if I ever sat down to try my hand at anything visual for once.

Boxes: Lost Fragments is of a very particular strain of puzzle game kicked off by Fireproof Games' "The Room" series, which started out as solving elaborate mechanical puzzle boxes and gradually grew in scope to solving elaborate mechanical rooms, sliding more into the "escape room" type of puzzle game that seems broadly more numerous than these. A shame, as I quite prefer the puzzle box approach to the full room/multi-room Myst-like set-ups, I think. It is all in the tactile fiddling with tools, instruments, pieces of the boxes. Turning screws and keys, pulling open doors and flaps, pulling levers, flipping switches, etc.

Boxes has quite a lot of boxes, actually; each chapter has four distinct puzzle boxes, and each one gives up a puzzle piece for the room outside the puzzle box rooms; clearing it ends the chapter, and there are five chapters. It hits all the points right; the boxes all look gorgeous, the animations for everything look slick and the sounds and game feel are fantastic. The actual puzzles are all really good, too, lots of good brain-teasers and puzzles where you have to infer the workings and expected solution from observing it.