Patrick’s Parabox
This award-winning debut could be this year’s Baba Is You
When Patrick Traynor submitted his first commercial game for this year’s IGF awards, he did so more in hope than expectation. He was delighted when it made the shortlist in the Excellence In Design category alongside a host of titles that, comparatively speaking, were household names. When he won – beating the likes of Slay The Spire, Lonely Mountains: Downhill and Grand Prize winner A Short Hike – it was an eyebrow-raiser for Traynor, too. “It was surreal,” he tells us, modestly adding that even being nominated was “a bigger reward than I would have ever expected.”
The shock and delight is still audible in his voice as he recalls the result. And yet when we sit down with an early build of the now award-winning Patrick’s Parabox, it doesn’t take long for us to understand why he took the prize. His game is a recursive Sokobanstyle puzzler that unfurls like a flower, steadily revealing its full splendour. Your goal is simple: you play a sentient box (two eyes distinguish it from its inanimate brethren) that must push others into clearly marked positions before reaching an exit square bearing your likeness. But some of these boxes are miniature worlds of their own: when they’re pressed up against a solid surface, you’re able to squeeze through their entrances and exits, shrinking as you head in and returning to your original size as you leave.
Sometimes these boxes are nested, and a single stage takes you deeper still, leading
you to explore worlds within worlds. As you move around, inside, outside and beyond, you effectively duplicate objects, including yourself – guiding a tiny block while simultaneously catching glimpses of a pink giant moving around the periphery of the stage. It is, as with many of the best puzzle games, easier to understand through play than to explain in words. Which is fortunate, because there are no tutorials here. Each new type of block (and, by extension, each new mechanic) is introduced but never overtly explained. Only by interacting with it do you gain the necessary insight into how each puzzle is solved.
“I love games where you have to figure everything out for yourself,” Traynor says. “They’re not to everyone’s tastes – a good example of this is Starseed Pilgrim, which I would highly recommend if you like that kind of thing. But I also tried to have a strong guiding hand so you can still get the good parts of that experience without having to struggle too much. Among the first 50 levels in the game, a lot of those are really trivial. But they’re tuned from playtest after playtest to deliver these little nuggets of knowledge and moments of discovery.”
‘Trivial’ is hardly the way we’d describe them, but despite its mind-bending conceit, Patrick’s Parabox is relatively forgiving. It avoids the temptations to drill its lessons home, too: its levels are parcelled out in small sets that introduce and develop new concepts without rehashing them, with optional paths to bonus puzzles. You might face a short series of levels that riff on a similar idea, but
Traynor is keen not to over-elaborate. We’re reminded in all the best ways of our dizzying first encounter with Baba Is You.
Traynor hasn’t been exclusively focused on Parabox in the two-and-a-half years he’s been making it. He’s actively involved with
I Wanna Maker, a construction kit based on infamous masocore platformer I Wanna Be The Guy, and continues to dabble with side projects and prototypes as a creative palate cleanser. These also help release some of the pressure he now feels – the benefit of the IGF win is that there are now more eyes on his game, but the result has certainly had an impact on how he works. “That’s the main thing that’s changed,” he says. “It’s making me feel like, ‘Oh, I have to really make this perfect thing.’ And that’s making me work slower. But I also want to get this game out the door because people want to play it. I’ve been trying to just get back in my room and get back in that mindset of making this thing that I enjoy making. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to that.”
Levels are parcelled out in small sets that introduce and develop new concepts