Patrick’s Parabox is a puzzling pushing game by Patrick Traynor. Try saying that three times fast. Winner of several awards, including the Excellence in Design Award at GDC 2020, this puzzle game makes use of a unique feature — recursive levels, opening upa world of mind-bending and challenging puzzles.
You control a little square with eyes, with only the ability to push objects around. Pulling isn’t an option, so you have to get creative with your methods. Pay attention to the environment around you, and you’ll soon find a gap or corner that opens up new possibilities. The block are rooms that can enter and push other room (blocks) into. By the way, Parabox is a great pun.
You start out with regular solid blocks, and move on to the block with open spaces — ones that consume other blocks and allow players to perform some pretty manipulation within the confines of that space. Each puzzle comes across as a method to teach you how to solve a specific type of problem and then the challenge rooms put your knowledge to the ultimate test.
Entering each area of the overworld, you will be tasked with solving puzzles based around a certain theme or mechanic. As you progress, more areas and challenge rooms open up — sometimes revisiting old tricks and melding them into a mind-bending recursive playground. Your only goal is to push each block into the allotted space and have even the player character as part of the solution.
This allows for a variety of puzzles, which are made more interesting by the introduction of the recursion mechanic — rooms inside themselves, creating an infinite cycle of rooms nested inside each other. Sometimes moving a room within a room allows me to arrive at the solution — and often it is hidden in plain sight.
If you want a puzzler that challenges you, yet doesn’t hold your hand, Patrick’s Parabox is for you. As you progress through this strange, puzzling world, you will find yourself falling further down the infinitely deep rabbit hole.
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