Patrick's Parabox (2022)

Sublime puzzle mechanics combined with excellent design. A must-play for puzzle fans.

• Incredibly-cool mechanics that bend your mind in the most fun way. Game is long and keeps introducing great mechanics all the way to the end.
• Top-tier puzzle design. This game is hands-down more fun than many of its peers because it teaches you what you need to know, gives you just enough space to make discoveries on your own, and generally makes you feel smart all the way through the game.
• Great semi-linear structure to the campaign. You can try harder puzzles at your own pace.
• Wonderful consistent aesthetic through the menus and puzzles.
• Hard to decide between a 4/5 and 5/5. Basically nothing bad to say about it, it is special among puzzle games, but not necessarily elevated beyond its own genre.

Patrick's Parabox is a fun puzzle game that starts simple and gradually gets more mind-bending as it adds layers to its recursion-themed block puzzles. I haven't finished all of its hundreds of puzzles, but I've done well over 100, and I've been impressed by the different surprises the game has in store and how its puzzle design subtly leads you along to head-scratching dead ends until your "eureka" moment.

Puzzles that loop back around inside themselves, or that reflect into an alternate version are a couple examples of the paradox-creating designs spread throughout the game. This could easily become insanely complex, but this game has a smartly limited scope and ruleset that builds upon itself at a slow pace to ensure it's manageable. This is not a super easy game, but it's not trying to be obscure like some others -- everything is pretty much sitting there in plain sight for you to experiment and figure it all out. That experimentation with the systems is what makes this game so fun.

I found the game's minimalist presentation to be generally effective at the visual communication it needed to do for the sake of the gameplay, but a bit too plain and lacking in style. Doesn't really impact the fun, but worth mentioning as a place for improvement. My only other small criticism is that the order puzzles are presented in sometimes didn't quite make sense to me. I'd do one and then a bit later I'd do one that seemed like it was trying to teach me how to do the prior one -- that may just be my own perception though.

I wouldn't say this is quite as memorable as the great indie puzzlers like The Witness or Baba Is You, but it felt a bit more approachable than those, and for the scope it's aiming for, it is very well done and worth checking out. Had a lot of fun so far and definitely plan to clear more of what's left for me.