Originally published on DualShockers on April 25, 2019. I have republished the introduction of the review here for myself. If you would like to see the original post, check it out here.
Puzzle games go hand-in-hand with portable devices. There’s something snappy about booting up a puzzle while waiting in a doctor’s office, passing the time during commercials, or simply taking a break. I often find myself wanting to dabble for a minute or two just to look up and see half an hour has flown by. It’s this loop of consumption that keeps me coming back to countless puzzle games on nearly any device I have with me on the go. I find a great puzzle game essential to my arsenal of daily devices.
When Nintendo released BoxBoy! on the 3DS in 2015, it looked like a game right up my alley — I just never got around to it. Then the sequels came out in 2016 and 2017 respectively, but I still never picked it up, despite glowing praise from critics I trust. Maybe the 3DS was fading to the background of my regularly used devices or maybe I was too cheap in college, but I never took the plunge into the boxy world cooked up by HAL Laboratories. The third entry was released shortly after the Switch’s launch and it left many, including myself, hoping to see the series make the jump to Nintendo’s hybrid machine.
It would take a couple of years, but Nintendo decided to cook up an all-new BoxBoy adventure for the Switch and I am glad that I finally had a chance to pick apart the blocky puzzles I had heard so much about. BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! packs a mind-bending punch that stole more of my time than I expected. With the 3DS entering its final days in the portable gaming zeitgeist, it’s nice to see a 3DS series make the jump to the Switch to carry on the puzzle platformer for the foreseeable future.