Designing the mind-bending puzzles in Patrick's Parabox
Patrick Traynor’s new puzzle game Patrick’s Parabox is both an evolution of the block-pushing puzzle game, and something new and unique to itself. It allows players to shrink down and enter boxes, where there can be whole levels inside them, but that is just barely scraping the surface of a unique and ingenious experience.
According to the game’s promotional text, every puzzle serves to communicate or reinforce some new concept, there is no filler! In a way reminiscent of Baba Is You, things keep on getting weirder, and the player is left wanting to keep going just to see what craziness will happen next. Patrick’s Parabox won the won the 2019 IndieCade Developers Choice Award, and Excellence in Design award from the Independent Games Festival in 2020.
Joel Couture did an interview with Patrick a couple of years ago while Parabox was in development. We caught up with him about a month after the game’s release and asked him some more questions, which he graciously answered.
Who are you, and what is Patrick's Parabox?
Hi, I’m Patrick, I’m an independent game developer and programmer from southern California. I’ve made a lot of freeware games, including many precision platformer fangames of I Wanna Be The Guy including I Wanna Maker, puzzle games, game jam games, and a few game dev tools. In recent years I’ve been super absorbed with playing and making puzzle games!
Patrick’s Parabox is my first commercial game. (The name is inspired by the game Stephen’s Sausage Roll.) It’s a block pushing puzzle game with a recursive twist: boxes can contain their own little areas, which in turn can contain other boxes, which can contain their own little areas with more boxes, etc. It’s quite a mind-bending system, and it gives rise to lots of
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