You’d be forgiven for seeing this game and thinking it’s related somehow to The Room. Ness did. And well, thats because it is, kind of.
Boxes is so inspired by The Room that it gives an explicit shout-out on the store page as being the inspiration. And I can see it. The design of the rooms and titular boxes is very reminiscent of The Room series, especially the first and second games in the series.
The game is broken into 5 chapters, each of which having 4 “levels” and a “boss” for lack of better words. Each level consists of a box. Each unique in design and function, but all very reminiscent of the very first The Room game in terms of style and difficulty. Solving a box rewards you with a fragment, an item that you take with you back to the hub room.
In the hub room, you take your fragments and solve the escape room puzzle around you in order to retrieve a token and access the next floor.
The game does have a plot, and it’s a lot more focused than The Room’s twisting plot through multiple games and vaguries. In Boxes, the plot is described through note cards left by a previous scientist, and as you progress through the floors and the boxes, the story unfolds into a single timeline and mystery, leaving you with only one question by the very end. I’ll leave that question as an exercise to the reader.
In terms of difficulty, it does include a lot of delicate scanning for small details, but significantly less so than in later The Room games. As each level is a single isolated box too, the search area is a lot smaller and focused, meaning that overall the game is easier. There is a hint system that will point you in the direction of a detail you missed, though I don’t know how it recharges other than “at minimum, between levels”, as I only ended up using it at most once per level.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2019810 £12.99
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/boxes-lost-fragments £12.23
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