Rating:

I've always thought it might be cool to have a non-linear adventure game, and while this game isn't exactly Heavy Rain, it does provide an interesting proposition - there are multiple solutions to every puzzle and the goal is to find as many of them as you can

Additional Info

Full Review

Pressures in real life can be a real pain for webmasters, and as such, I've got little time left over this past week for reviewing larger indie titles. Fortunately, I found some spare time today and set about looking for short games I can post my views about - here's what I found.

Think Outside the Box is a short adventure game created in RPG Maker XP by a developer known as Pokemaniac. Although I call it an adventure game, it does not actually have a substantial story to tell - rather, it falls into the genre because of the nature of puzzles that players are presented with, which are traditional Sierra-styled inventory puzzles requiring you to use the right items at the right places.

Although there isn't a narrative per se, it does have a simple premise. You play a newborn box in the World of Boxes, and as a rite of childhood, are required to survive a dungeon filled with puzzles to overcome a genetic flaw of boxes - the inability to think out of the box. Humor, as you can see, makes up a large part of the game's charm.

The game is played by basically looking for ways to exit a room. Each room is filled with items, obstacles and characters you can interact with in ways similar to traditional point and click adventure games - you can talk to characters, pick up items, combine items and use items. The goal is to find different ways of getting to and opening doors that lead out of the room - each new method you find bags you some points, which can be used to unlock the next room.

While I find this a fun and refreshing idea, there are some things I feel break the game for me. There is a technical bug that makes all the dialogue boxes come up blank. I normally excuse minor technical errors in freeware games, but this one is a showstopper that makes the game virtually unplayable. Fortunately, there is a simple fix - the game comes with some font files that you need to copy to your Windows' font folder for the in-game text to show. I do hope this is a bug and not as designed because the less technically inclined gamers will be completely lost.

The second problem I had with the game was the unintuitive user interface. The game requires you to go through 4 button presses just to use an item (open up the menu, select "Item", select desired item, select "Use item"), making it highly inconvenient. This is on top of the fact that the inventory is accessed from the main menu, a dialog normally reserved for meta game functions like save and load.

But despite all my nitpicking, I still found this game an enjoyable experience. There are only 3 rooms, so total playtime can be estimated to be around 15-20 minutes. The game can be download over at its RMN profile page.