Puzzles are my bread and butter of video games. Therefore, I’m fond of the majority of puzzle games to some degree. Bear that in mind when I admit that I’m reluctant to say that I particularly enjoyed Super Box Land Demake. It’s one of the most average puzzle games I’ve ever played. Ever. Not bad. Not great. Just overwhelmingly average.
The goal in each level is incredibly simple. Push the boxes onto the buttons to open the gate. This never changes throughout the 100 levels on offer. It’s always just pushing boxes. This results in the difficulty curve being very, very shallow since the base mechanics are stretched so thin. The only difficult puzzles for me were placed at the end of each world, and even then they didn’t take longer than a few minutes.
There is a rudimentary difficulty option available, but it only changes the rewind mechanic for when you make mistakes. Easy, undo as much as you like. Medium, undo as long as you have battery life (batteries being found in bushes, like in real life). Hard, no undo option for you. I played on medium, but often found myself exiting and re-entering a stage to reset it anyway, unless I’d made a minor slip-up I could fix.
How are the puzzles though? Are they fun? On rare occasions, yes. Every so often there’d be a smaller puzzle which required careful planning to avoid trapping boxes in corners or against each other, which I really enjoyed. But for every one of those, there were many others that were vacuous and boring.
Far too frequently I’d figure out the solution to a puzzle almost instantly, but have to spend what felt like forever pushing boxes from one side of the screen to the other. For some reason, levels are often made wider than necessary and it just makes the game drag once you’ve figured the room out. Even worse than this though, is that some stages will simply contain the same puzzle twice, but it’ll be flipped or rotated on one side of the screen. This serves simply to extend the game’s playtime, and waste my time.
On the bright side, the game does offer two-player co-op or even allows you to control two players with one controller. This adds nothing to the complexity of the puzzles, but I can see it being fun in a speed-run context at least. Or if you just want a little puzzle game to play with the kids that they can easily grasp. I tried the two-characters, one-controller setup for a trophy, didn’t find it intuitive (moving with the right stick felt so wrong), and switched back to controlling a single player straight after.
The pixel art is also bright and colourful, which is important in a game you’ll be staring at while you think things through. The addition of weather effects appearing at random added some great variety as well, even changing the colours of levels. I only wish the music had as much variety to it. The single loop the game has drove both me and my housemates insane till I just had to mute it.
Super Box Land Demake does fit smoothly into Ratalaika’s Easy Plat Collection (as I’ve called it) since you earn the platinum trophy at 40 levels in. No need to complete the game for the final trophy. Nope. Just 40% of it… I earned the platinum trophy after a mere 38 minutes and 7 seconds. My final playtime was just under 2 hours, so if I was in it for trophies alone (and didn’t have to, you know, review it) I could have stopped with another 80 minutes of levels left untouched.
Needless to say, I’m still not a fan of Ratalaika’s releases having easy platinums as a way to sell them. It devalues the games themselves, even if it may result in increased sales. I’m not even sure if it does since it just reduces my confidence in the publisher’s titles if their games practically require an easy platinum be included to sell them.
So overall, Super Box Land Demake isn’t a game I’d recommend unless you’re in the market for a bare bones, box pushing bore-fest (with a trophy on top). It requires far too much running around to complete puzzles that you’ve solved in your head already, or even solved on the opposite side of the level already. The visuals are charming enough but nothing you haven’t seen before. The difficulty options don’t add anything since you can just reset by leaving a level and coming back. It’s all just very, very, very, very OK.
A digital copy of Super Box Land Demake for PS4 was provided by the developer.
Find Super Box Land Demake on the PlayStation store here: https://store.playstation.com/?resolve=EP0896-CUSA17367_00-RGBOXLANDDEBUNDL?smcid=psblog:en:page-name::Super%20Box%20Land%20Demake