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Zip archive of the ORC2007 entries
Contains puzzlebox.taf
Requires an ADRIFT version 4 interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

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The Puzzle Box

by Richard Otter profile

2007

Web Site

(based on 6 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

An entry in the 2007 One Room Game Competition. Your objective is to escape the room by solving a number of logic puzzles.


Game Details


Awards

3rd Place - InsideADRIFT Game of the Year Comp 2007

8th Place - One Room Game Competition 2007

Editorial Reviews

Delron
Review Compilation
Some of the puzzles seemed a little random and even counter-intuitive. The clock tower puzzle had me stumped until I looked at the walkthrough and saw that it wasn't enough to set the clock to the same time that I was seeing. I didn't pick this up at all - maybe it was referred to in the game and I missed it. And the less said about the 'examine ceiling' puzzle the better. That one totally blind-sided me.

I played this one to completion because I thought it had a great hook. If it wasn't beta-tested then it should have been, and a more rewarding ending would do wonders for this game.
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Member Reviews

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Number of Reviews: 2
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
A fairly plotless series of logic puzzles, December 23, 2007
by Kake (London, England)
Related reviews: Richard Otter, ***, One-Room Game Competition 2007

This game really has no plot at all — it's basically just a series of rather unvaried logic puzzles, the kind of thing you find in IQ tests. The ending was a slight let-down; it basically just stopped, which is a shame, because there were some reasonably effective attempts at building up atmosphere as I progressed through the puzzles. I didn't not enjoy the game, but I found it rather unsatisfying.

Trial-and-error seems to have been guarded against; you have to have seen your clue before you can input the puzzle's answer. The answers are randomised, too, so you can't just get a cheat sheet and plug in the answers.

I got stuck on one of the later puzzles, and because the description of the object I'd been using to solve the earlier puzzles had changed to "You see nothing special about <thing>", I thought the next clue would be elsewhere in the room. This was, in fact, a bug (and one which has now been reported to the author). I managed to get through it, though, since "hint" told me to examine things that were in the now-nondescript object, and sure enough this was where my clue was.

Couple of typos/spelling mistakes, nothing major. The game also let me strip naked without comment.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Dull structure and repetitive puzzles, December 23, 2007

The premise is that the protagonist is locked into a haunted room with the puzzle box of the game's title. The hauntedness of the room is not especially important and the framing story barely affects play, though: instead, we spend the entire game entering a series of combinations into the puzzle box, each combination leading only to the opportunity to enter another one.

We discover the combinations, for the most part, by examining the environment, especially a highly detailed oil painting on the wall. There are a couple of puzzles that require some sort of leap of intuition to work out how an element of the painting reveals a combination for the lockbox, but quite often it is simply a matter of finding an appropriate sequence of colors and numbers and laboriously entering them into the box.

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This is version 11 of this page, edited by Richard Otter on 17 March 2023 at 2:11pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page