A Giant Escape Room
Boxes: Lost Fragments joins a stable of other games developed by Big Loop Studios and published by Snapbreak Games. The studio focuses on escape room puzzle games, with franchises such as Doors, Escape Machine City, and Tiny Robots. This game focuses on solving puzzle boxes. While the puzzles themselves aren’t particularly challenging, the creativity of the gorgeous, fully mechanical puzzle boxes was more than enough to keep me invested.
The main character of Boxes: Lost Fragments is a brilliant thief commissioned to steal a mask. However, once they get their hands on the item in question, the mysterious building locks them in, forcing them to solve a collection of highly advanced puzzle boxes to find a way out.
Solid Gameplay and Controls
If you’ve played a Myst-inspired puzzle game before, the Boxes: Lost Fragments will feel familiar. The majority of the game is spent in front of a puzzle box, searching for parts of it that you can interact with. This varies from latches you can unhook, doors you can open or slide out of the way, to pieces you can twist or unscrew.
The touchscreen controls mimic the motions you’d make to do the actions. You tap on something to get closer to it—or to pick up an item. If it’s a latch, you touch the screen and slide the way you want the latch to move. For something you need to slide or rotate, you do the same, moving your finger where the item should go. Pinching zooms you out, just like when you’re on a webpage.
Collecting items allows you to interact with different aspects of the boxes. This includes keys, levers, mechanical pieces, and screwdrivers that can be attached to a box or be used to open part of it. Solving a puzzle box awards you with a fragment that could be used to solve the puzzle on the main floor, allowing you to progress.
Sometimes it was difficult to tell what you could interact with, but the game leaned heavily on the side of interacting with an object. So if nothing happened when you tapped on something or tried to slide it, it couldn’t be moved. Overall, I found the controls intuitive and solid. There were only one or two instances where I struggled to get something to work—out of fifty puzzle boxes.
Mechanical Marvels
What stole the show in the game were the puzzle boxes themselves. They start off ornate, but it’s where they go from there that really impresses. Solving puzzles slowly opens up the box, but it doesn’t open like an ordinary box. Instead, the outside comes off, often revealing something else entirely. So you end up with a standard box turning into a steam engine, a cylinder turning into a castle, and a treasure chest becoming a slot machine.
Gears were a staple, with the inside of many puzzle boxes run by gears, steam, or other mechanical parts. The team spent a lot of time on the animations, with the pieces unlocking, turning, or sliding smoothly. The mechanical aspects, such as gears spinning, levers sliding, and pieces fitting together are animated in loving detail.
Some boxes took unexpected, turns, too. Such as one that revealed a series of platforms inside that needed to be navigated by a mechanical ladybug. Another resulted in a bizarre game of red-light, green light. As the constraints of space didn’t seem to be an issue, you’d sometimes go inside the boxes briefly.
Several times I thought: “that’s so cool!” I was eager to continue to see what the box would transform into, or what Rube Goldberg-style machine would appear next.
Sketched Out Story
The story wasn’t an important part of the game, secondary to the boxes and interior of the building. It still had the power to intrigue, though. It was told through a series of notes left near the puzzles. The first note is when the main character arrives, and explains that they’d been hired for a purpose. The others are written by the person who created the puzzles you need to solve and stitch together why they were created in the first place.
There’s a fair amount of science fiction involved, as dark energy factors into the equation. That allows the developers to play with space, with the puzzle boxes appearing to exist in different dimensions that are reached through portals. Not much time is spent on this. In that way, it reminds me of Myst; there are aspects of the world that you need to just accept without explanation.
The developers hint strongly at a sequel, which makes sense as their other series were multi-game.
An Engaging Puzzle Game
Most of the puzzles were simple enough, once you had the right item, so it was rare that I got stuck. When I did, it was because I’d missed something I could interact with. That was easily solved by a hint button which highlighted what part of the box you could work on next. It didn’t give solutions to puzzles, so you’d need to look elsewhere for hints on those. Though most of those were mechanical as well, with the puzzle being more how than what.
I found unlocking the puzzle boxes satisfying and was excited to see what creative result there would be from my efforts. While I would have enjoyed more detail about the story, there was enough to explain what was happening and why, so it served its purpose.
The title also has the benefit of having a free trial of the first 10 stages. You can test the puzzles out before buying. This is especially useful since it’s pricier than most mobile games at $6.99.
