Bye-Bye BoxBoy! (3DS)
On March 27th, 2023, the 3DS and Wii U eShops will remove the ability to buy new games, meaning hundreds of games will become unavailable for purchase. For most of March, The Game Hoard has been trying to cover some of these games that will disappear, but for this, the final farewell, it felt appropriate to focus on a series that was born on and found considerable success through the eShop. While Hal Laboratories is known mostly for the Kirby series and its round pink protagonist, on 3DS they produced a trilogy of games starring a monochrome square protagonist named BoxBoy. While the release of BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! on the Switch shows it will live on in some form, Bye-Bye BoxBoy! feels like it was meant to be a finale for the small series. Whether the previous titles will one day reappear on other platforms remains in question though, so for now, let’s say bye-bye to the eShop by seeing what Bye-Bye BoxBoy! offers.
Bye-Bye BoxBoy! is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer set in a minimalist world with a fairly plain looking hero. Qbby is a square with two dots for eyes and two lines for legs, and while you can later purchase some costumes for him that give him a more distinct appearance, the world he lives in is similarly made of simple shapes and so he hardly feels out of place. In Bye-Bye BoxBoy!, his world isn’t the only one you’re visiting though, the little box joining his friends Qucy and Qudy as they take off into space to explore other planets. The planets aren’t huge departures from their home world, but they do move away from the monochrome presentation as each world has its own specific color tinting the background. While there isn’t any text to tell the story, it quickly becomes clear that a dangerous black smoke is spreading across the galaxy, Qbby often finding his progress to purifying a planet blocked by patches of it until he’s cleared a few levels and gathered the power needed to eliminate it.
Besides a fairly simple jump, Qbby’s main means of exploring the short but numerous levels of Bye-Bye BoxBoy! is through his ability to create boxes. While it sounds fairly simple at first, the applications for this are broader than you might think because of the way he produces new boxes. When you want to make some squares, you hold down a button and start pressing directions, squares extending out of your body in a chain. Depending on the limits placed on you in a level, you can make a set of interlinked squares that usually comprises of anywhere from 3 to 8 boxes that are just as big as Qbby. Some fairly obvious applications come to mind, such as constructing an uninterrupted line to make a bridge over a pit of spikes or making a staircase to reach otherwise inaccessible heights, but the more fascinating uses involve the fact that these boxes do initially start off attached to Qbby. While you can toss them to get them where they need to be, other times you’ll need to take advantage of the fact you’re part of the box chain, able to make shapes like a hook so you can jump and snag yourself on a ledge. You can then disengage your block-building to pull yourself up to a new area, even simpler levels able to provide some challenge with basic arrangements just by tasking you with building small but intricate structures yourself. You can only have one active block chain at a time as well, so overcoming a level will involve actually figuring out the problem much of the time rather than trying to squeak out a solution that attempts to ignore the obstacles in your way.
The different planets you visit will bring with them new mechanics and dangers that complicate your block-based platforming. Some become constant fixtures like lasers you’ll often need to block properly to make progress while others will mostly be unique to a sequence of levels, Bye-Bye BoxBoy! doing a pretty good job of bringing in new ideas that require a good degree of thought to realize the various ways your boxes can interact with them. In a water area, your boxes float, this initially used to give you ways to cross water but also leading to the fact anytime you build squares underwater, they will try to float up to the surface meaning you’ll often have to jam them in the right crevices so they can actually be used properly for navigation. Many levels feature areas you need to get BoxBoy to in order to trigger a door, but others might involve trying to alter a dangerous creature’s path so it activates its own version of the triggers. Some of the more interesting new gimmicks come in the worlds where your boxes gain new powers. One area features rocket blocks where after their shape is set in stone they’ll ignite their jets and fly upward, and since you can leave them attached to Qbby instead of throwing them, this can make them sometimes function like a jetpack. Another area features bomb blocks where much of the level is destructible, but since puzzles are often tightly designed to be solved in certain ways, you’ll need to make sure you don’t break anything too important. The occasional appearance of a Qbaby even adds the need to make sure the tiny tot following behind you can clear the same areas as you or, in some cases, you’ll be separated and need to figure out ways to help both of you progress with either one falling into bottomless pits, onto pointy spikes, or into the black smoke that appears in some stages.
While special abilities like the rocket block do briefly recontextualize how you utilize your block-placing power, mostly your main form of interaction is consistent enough that the puzzle solving feels fair. Even if you do use some of the 3DS’s play coins to buy hints, seeing the structure you’re meant to build never makes you feel like you lacked the right info to produce it, you just perhaps didn’t consider some of the special applications of your skill or the various shapes you can make with your chain of squares. If you do die or want to reset because you feel you messed up the sequence of actions necessary to clear a small puzzle area, the game places a checkpoint after each puzzle that comprises a level, meaning you don’t need to re-solve anything from earlier in a stage that usually consists of four or so puzzles one after the other. Beyond simply learning how to progress past the obstacles in your path, there are floating black crowns to collect that often involve figuring out another way to use your blocks in the current area. Most puzzles do fit cleanly on one screen so that helps keep their scope condensed, but the crowns also place a limit on how many blocks you can place in total in a level before they’ll disappear, meaning you can sometimes need to be economical across a whole stage if you want to grab these crowns and spend them on rewards.
The rewards in Bye-Bye BoxBoy! are actually fairly substantial, varied, and worth pursuing. The challenge levels are perhaps the strongest prize, these different challenge worlds each introducing a new limit on how you play. You might have to clear a set of levels without the ability to jump or you find in another world that falling from more than a single block’s height is an instant death. Challenge levels are often smaller than normal stages but tougher as you need to think more cleverly to utilize what skills you still have to overcome new restrictions, and since there are no crowns in these levels you can focus more on feeling out the solution for these tougher concepts. Costumes for Qbby can also bought with crowns as can music, but another highlight of the extras are a set of comics you can purchase. Presented a bit like newspaper comics, these actually have speech bubbles so Qbby, Qucy, and Qudy can speak in them, and the short silly stories they tell make good use of the Bye-Bye BoxBoy! mechanics for quick and cute punchlines. You won’t be punished for missing crowns, but the game does make the rewards for pursuing them certainly worthwhile even beyond just providing more stages to tackle, and with 18 worlds in the standard adventure plus bonus stages to provide crowns, you can thankfully buy what you like without worry that chances to earn more will dry up.
THE VERDICT: Bye-Bye BoxBoy!’s foundational box-creating mechanic is put through its paces well as new mechanics and situations keep requiring you to think of different ways your simple power can be applied. Crowns encourage you to pursue some more difficult uses and provide satisfying rewards if you grab enough of them, but even the regular stages shift up the formula enough that it remains fresh even when doing familiar work. The ease of retrying puzzles and their small size makes it easy to keep pressing forward to earn quick victories, but there’s still enough thought involved in clearing stages that it never feels too simple to succeed either.
And so, I give Bye-Bye BoxBoy! for Nintendo 3DS…
A GOOD rating. There’s not really much to find at fault in Bye-Bye BoxBoy!. Even though the box creation power is a bit basic, it is iterated upon well both in the way new environmental challenges influence how you make your squares and with the occasional extra power like the rocket and bomb blocks. A puzzle’s solution always feels within reach because of the consistent elements of your special ability and segmenting a stage into a sequence of smaller challenges allows for the demands placed on you to feel surmountable while also making resetting if you mess up not too painful. Crowns and the challenge levels ensure there are areas where you must think a bit deeper, but crowns definitely do more legwork in keeping up the mental stimulation since they’re consistent across the main adventure rather than something you need to step out and do just for the sake of it. The little touches like the comics make the simplistic characters of Bye-Bye BoxBoy! more endearing as well, but the overall straightforward story is suitable for a game where the presentation is generally minimalist as well. There’s a good batch of effective gimmicks and perhaps the suggested route for improvement would just be to do even more new ideas, but for players who do enjoy puzzle platformers, they’ll likely find an enjoyable adventure that they might not wrack their brain to complete but will certainly find enough to test their understanding of how to build block chains to keep it a nice mental test.
Bye-Bye BoxBoy! and the other games in the initial trilogy are available in a physical form but only in Japan, and while missing out on the comics and helpful secondary tutorials due to a language barrier would be a shame, at least this farewell to BoxBoy! isn’t as absolute as some games on the system. Sure, there will be some ways to find this game elsewhere after the shop stops allowing new purchases, but simply opening your system and paying five dollars was not only easy, but it gave Hal Laboratories the kind of support that motivated them to create this trilogy. BoxBoy! + BoxGirl! does at least show us that the end isn’t always final though, Qbby coming back in a new game on the Switch and perhaps his earlier adventures may reemerge some day too. Instead of saying bye-bye to this well-realized puzzle platformer, let’s send it off with an optimistic and hopeful “see you later” that feels a nicer fit for this adorable adventure.