BoxyBoy

~ BOXYBOY ~

Media Rings / Thinking Rabbit / NEC

HuCard

1990

BoxyBoy gives you the opportunity to visit some of the world's greatest nations, including Egypt, Japan, and, uh, "SOUTHPOLE." Once you arrive at a particular country, you get to CHALLENGE it...

...which basically means you have to shove a bunch of boxes onto a bunch of dots.

And that's all there is to it. Some boards are easy (not many...); some are insanely difficult. Some are small, while others are so large that they occupy multiple screens. The game is somewhat helpful and forgiving: you can rewind your moves and bring up a faraway-view map screen to get a better idea of the big picture.

You can hammer away at these simple-in-concept puzzles over 250 rounds if you want to. Sadly, unless this boxy brand of conundrum is really your kind of thing, you'll probably find the adventure too uninteresting and repetitive to stick with for more than a couple dozen levels. Even if you do enjoy other puzzlers that involve shoving shit around, chances are you've experienced some that do a much better job of keeping the player interested and involved. Old Adventures of Lolo for NES basically boils down to pushing stuff, but it features a likable hero and plenty of enemy creatures for him to deal with (and even equips him with the means of putting those creatures to use in the puzzle solving). The Turbo's very own Tricky Kick is simpler than Lolo, more of a BoxyBoy-type affair, but succeeds thanks to cool level themes and appealing characters who have their own unique storylines, which are told through opening and closing cinemas. To be fair, BoxyBoy does offer periodic congratulatory cinematic screens...

...but this is hardly the sort of stuff that'll drive a player to persevere through a multitude of tough levels. Now, if BoxyBoy were, like, my only TurboGrafx game, I could imagine spending hours and hours on its most challenging boards and eventually developing a fondness for the effort. Solving a hellish room layout does feel awfully good...

...but maybe that's just relief. And I don't imagine there are many people in that unenviable BB-only position, so few will have reason to play this thing for very long when the system offers so many more-attractive alternatives. Like Gate of Thunder. Or Rondo of Blood. Or Tricky Kick.