Art Style: Boxlife

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Art Style: Boxlife is a Puzzle game released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2009 and then grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when that system was released. This game has players using the touchscreen to cut and fold squares of paper to make cube-shaped boxes.

The presentation here is pretty simple, using few colors and very simple 3D visuals to depict the paper and boxes. This is backed by repetitive music that will get annoying pretty quickly, and occasionally joined by various noises like animal noises for some reason.

The gameplay here is straightforward in theory. You have paper segmented into squares, and you are instructed to cut the squares in such a way that the shapes it makes can be folded into boxes. Players do this by using the touchscreen with three different tools – a cutting tool, a folding tool, and a tool that lets you undo cuts.

In practice, it is far from intuitive to look at a series of squares and instinctively see how it can be made into the perfect shapes needed to fold into a cube. This isn’t to say that the game is bad, but that for most people this is going to be frustrating and never quite hit the compelling gameplay one hopes to find in a good Puzzle game.

In the end, I suppose there may be a niche audience out there who will appreciate Art Style: Boxlife. But for most players, this game’s unintuitive gameplay will make it one they’re just not as likely to enjoy as other Puzzle games out there.

tl;dr – Art Style: Box Life is a Puzzle game that has players cutting paper to form shapes that will allow it to be folded into a cube-shaped box. The gameplay concept here is sound in theory and the execution is decent enough, but the issue here is that the actual task itself is not especially intuitive, and I expect most players will find it more tedious than fun.

Grade: C

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