Patrick’s Parabox Review: What Goes Around Comes Around Even Better

In this bursting-at-the-seams collection of over 350 handcrafted puzzles, you’ll need to think both inside and outside the box.

Patrick’s Parabox
Photo: Patrick Traynor

An old riddle asks, “When is a door not a door?” The playful answer: “When it’s a jar.” Developer Patrick Traynor has taken a similarly mischievously punny approach to an analogous question. Within the classic block-pushing sokoban puzzle genre, he dares to ask, “When is a box not a box?” And the answer is right there in the title of the delightfully inventive Patrick’s Parabox. In this bursting-at-the-seams collection of over 350 handcrafted puzzles, you’ll need to think both inside and outside the box to not only solve each conundrum but, in some cases, solve seemingly impossible recursive paradoxes in order to proceed.

Patrick’s Parabox begins straightforwardly enough. The player controls a two-eyed box that, in order to exit a level, must be guided to a specific two-eyed square on the map. The catch is that in order to activate that exit, you must first move other boxes on the map onto specific squares of their own. You do so by pushing them into empty spaces, and early levels revolve around figuring out the correct order in which to move boxes without blocking your own path to the exit, given that you can’t move diagonally. That cardinal rule never changes throughout the game, but the types of boxes, and the rules regarding them certainly do. Some boxes aren’t solid, and if you move or push something into them, you end up within them.

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By stuffing puzzles within puzzles as part of its recursive system, Patrick’s Paradox becomes the three-dimensional chess of sokoban games, and it just keeps getting deeper. There are 18 hub areas, and each one adds a new layer to this brain-bender of a gaming experience. All told, there are nearly 400 stumpers, including a post-game “Appendix” of extra ideas and an art gallery that is itself a series of puzzles rendered in the alpha version’s simpler graphics.

There’s never too much of the very good thing that is Patrick’s Parablox, particularly because you can choose how far down any particular rabbit hole you want to go. There’s a clearly marked, gentler main path through each hub area. These levels can still be tricky, but they’re more generously designed as hands-on opportunities to master each new mechanic. Optional challenges expand on these concepts while also introducing new ones, whether that’s adding buddy blocks that mimic your every move or aesthetic shifts into ASCII art (a la Dwarf Fortress) that test how well you’re interpreting what you’re seeing.

One of the most impressive feats of Patrick’s Parabox is how cleanly it manages to convey the complexity of what’s going on, using a clean color palette to help distinguish between the various types of boxes, so that you know at a quick glance which ones you can interact with. Toward the end of the game, players must intentionally string together chains of potential paradoxes—as in trying to push a block outside of itself—in order to interact with twinned “paraboxes,” which are designated with one or more infinity or epsilon symbols. If that sounds convoluted, it’s worth remembering that a picture is worth more than a thousand words: Like M.C. Escher’s artwork, it instantly makes about as much sense as it possibly can.

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The idea of a Sokoban in which players push boxes into and out of other boxes isn’t new; Traynor credits that concept at least as far back as the 2018 puzzler Sokosoko by Juner. But Traynor’s taken the idea far beyond that game, and not just because he comes up with more than a dozen different types of boxes that can be entered and exited. By combining the various principles of his puzzle boxes, he’s turned them not just into optical illusions but into art.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by the developer.

Score: 
 Developer: Patrick Traynor  Publisher: Patrick Traynor  Platform: PC  Release Date: March 29, 2022  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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