Four Fat Chicks -- Pandora’s Box Review

Review by Orb

As a Macintosh enthusiast, I have finally committed the ultimate sin. I have played a Microsoft game on a Microsoft OS ... and enjoyed it. Okay, so I did all this on a Mac using Virtual PC, but who's splitting hairs here?

Pandora's Box is a straight puzzle title that will be enjoyed best by those fond of games such as Jewels of the Oracle, Quest for Karma, Safecracker, or even Shivers or The 7th Guest. It also serves the purpose of being a game to take a break with for those who like playing more story-driven adventure games, but need a diversion for a little bit and just want to solve some puzzles for fun.

Microsoft hired Alexey Pajitnov, the guy that made Tetris, the ultimate time-waster game of the early arcades and consoles, and he definitely delivers a higher level of that same kind of playing experience here. The premise of Pandora's Box is as thin as any puzzle game—the player's purpose is to solve puzzles to repair "damaged" items, the damage having been done by spirits escaped from a box accidentally opened by Pandora. There are 10 puzzles per city, allocated in 35 cities all over the world. The final outcome is that the player has recovered pieces of Pandora's Box and trapped the seven escaped spirits back into the box. As the bits of the box are recovered, the player is given pieces of the stories of each spirit.

The puzzles are of the highly addictive "just one more, then I'm getting the hell away from the computer" sort. There are ten different kinds of puzzles, and they seem to be interspersed randomly in each area accessed. Each is made from a manipulated photograph of the country in which the current puzzle is "from" or from pictures of famous pieces of art from these same regions.

The fact that the puzzles are formulaic in that they are the same ten puzzles over and over, made different through the use of the photographs they are made from, gives the developers the ability to expand the package and increase the number of puzzles in the game for rerelease as a "Puzzle Game of the Year" edition (a moniker gotten from having won a "best of" category at the 1999 E3), which increases the number of puzzles the game contains from 350 to 400. This also goes right to the edge of overkill, as the same 10 puzzles 400 times becomes 40 each, so you have to either love all of them or find some you love and skip the rest.

The design is extremely well-done. Each puzzle give the player a very basic walkthrough that explains, step by step, how it works the first time that kind of puzzle is played. This is pretty much unheard-of in adventure games, or puzzle games for that matter, which usually maintain that figuring out what they are talking about is part of the "fun." Personally, I like having things explained to me just fine.

Puzzles can be timed or played at leisure. On occasion, the game gives the player a bonus for completing a puzzle within a certain amount of time. A scorecard is kept of how many puzzles have been completed, and for each ten puzzles completed, the game gives the player a marker to be able to count a puzzle complete without having to finish it. (Clear proof, in my opinion, that they know darned well some of these become redundant.) There are also hint markers that can be earned randomly upon completion of some puzzles—these help the player with the next step in the puzzle she is currently on if she is stymied.

Background music in the game is so similar from place to place as to be almost game Muzak, if such a thing could possibly exist. Each area's music lightly maintains the air of the country that the player is working on, kind of like Culture Lite. It is not in any way intended to be a focal point in the game, but instead adds a never-ending dreamy background for the player that acts as an additional assistant in forgetting just how much time has been spent playing during any one sitting.

Pandora's Box is meant to be pure fun escapist fare. There's no stress or hurry in playing it, and its design is such that it is a relaxing activity, kind of like doing a jigsaw puzzle was before the advent of computers. (Or still is for the electronically challenged, I suppose.) For anyone that likes puzzles just for the fun of it, it's definitely worth the money for the amount of fun packed in the package.