Indie Game of the Week 470: Boxes: Lost Fragments

Myst was a huge paradigm shift for the adventure game genre, for better or worse depending on who you ask, though even detractors can at least admit that it found an effective means to make the burgeoning 3D polygonal trend work for the humble narrative-driven graphic adventure genre. Part of what appealed about its world are its many intricate machines, though technology of the time limited how much you were able to interact with them. When Fireproof's The Room series of tactile puzzle-adventure games came along they felt like they were answering a long-simmering desire to poke and prod at these elaborate steampunk mechanisms, in some way recreating the compelling nature of Hellraiser's Lament Configuration (if someone were risking an eternity of sadomasochism to solve that thing, it must've been a heck of a lot more irresistible than your usual fidget toy). Whatever their inspirational source, The Room proved to be an attractive mix of adventure game puzzles and tinkering around with boxes with an endless number of latches, switches, levers, hinges, buttons, dials, and sliders to discover. It makes more than enough sense that it would go on to inspire imitators like Boxes: Lost Fragments.

This box was a train all along! Gasp! I guess nothing in the rules says it can't be.

Boxes: Lost Fragments not only recreates the Victorian-era puzzle boxes of The Room but much of its overarching story too: you're summoned to an eccentric inventor's tower to solve a series of puzzle boxes, with the promise of a life-changing reward at their conclusion. The game breaks itself up into five chapters, each containing four box "instances"—that is, self-contained box puzzles that end once you've found the special item at the box's core—and then those four special items are used to solve the current floor's puzzle and open up the route to the next. The focus on boxes and on this standalone structure hearkens back to the very first The Room, rather than the more expansive later entries in that series where you'd typically explore a mansion and be picking up items from one puzzle to use elsewhere. The tighter focus was presumably what the developers of Boxes: Lost Fragments, Belgian team Big Loop Studios, appreciated most from that inaugural barn-burner and perhaps missed from its looser-built sequels. It might just be my own critical thought patterns being projected here, but sometimes when I see a game like this it feels like a dissenting opinion made concrete: a means of taking the road you wished had been traveled instead of the one the original developers opted for. This sort of thing is especially apparent in graphic adventure game throwbacks, such as those from Wadjet Eye, which clearly didn't take to the dire FMV quagmire that adventure gaming passed into around the mid-'90s and perhaps longed for an alternative timeline for how that genre evolved enough to manifest it for real, in a manner of speaking.

Boxes shares all the strengths of The Room: the boxes are engaging to pore over from every direction, looking for secret switches and panels that might contain some useful key item, and occasionally solving puzzles that are a bit more involved than pushing a tiny lever or slider. These are the typical Mensa-style brainteasers where you might be matching up symbols or sliding something around a grid to reach an exit, and they're a necessary break from the more facile mechanism-based progression provided with many of these instances. There's also a hint of magical realism, courtesy of the game's alchemy-adjacent narrative, which lends itself to the occasional visual spectacle that comes from solving a box, including moving trains, elemental spirits, and visions of the spectral realm that might conceal a clue to some passcode or other. Each box typically has a theme, be it geographical (there's ones based on Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, Japan, Norse mythology, etc.) or mechanical (at least a couple are based on trains and clocks), and these also help make the game's twenty box instances stand out from one another despite some familiar mechanics binding each one. The presentation is top-notch too: it has that sharpness and visual accuracy you'd want from a game with a lot of moving parts which, in addition to its similarly verisimilitudinous sound design, make these boxes feel like real objects that you're jostling around.

A typical puzzle, or at least the kind that doesn't involve using items or finding a secret slider mechanism. This one's simpler than it looks though there's a few tricky ones to be found here too.

Beyond that, I can't really elaborate further without spoiling the fun of unraveling the game's mysteries, both in the micro as you look for whatever hidden compartment has eluded you so far to the macro as you discover the true reason you were summoned to this tower and what the consequences of your curiosity may entail. As with The Room games I derived a great deal of satisfaction from the game's series of dopamine kicks as everything clicked into place—I might say this game is a good deal easier than The Room games too, in case you found yourself stymied too often in that series to enjoy it fully—and otherwise plays like a worthy, if not wholly original, side series in case you found yourself jonesing for more puzzle boxes between The Room entries. I don't know if this will become its own subgenre in due course (I've played at least one other game like these, Access Denied: Escape) but if it ever does I'll be sure to check its tag on Steam to devour more of the same. It's the sort of casual but rewarding experience that makes for a great chaser after a shot of something as intense as a Souls-like or a mentally exhausting numbers-heavy RPG. Games like this certainly help me understand the wisdom of the feline kingdom, which posits that boxes are often more intriguing than their contents.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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