The Puzzle Box

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.

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.