BoxyBoy

~ BOXYBOY ~

Media Rings / Thinking Rabbit / NEC

HuCard

1990

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

...which basically means you have to move 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 like. 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 it 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 boiled down to pushing stuff, but it featured a likable hero and a variety of enemy creatures for him to deal with (and even equipped him with the means of putting those creatures to use in the puzzle solving). The Turbo's very own Tricky Kick was simpler than Lolo, more of a BoxyBoy-type affair, but succeeded thanks to cool block and level themes, along with appealing characters who had their own individual storylines, which were 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 ton of tough levels. Though 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 title. It does feel awfully good to make it through a hellish room layout...

...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.