The first puzzle game I played for comparison was Old Box on addictinggames.com. In this particular game all of the levels are played within boxes, and within boxes in boxes, the goal being to find a knife in each level in order to cut open the next box to continue on with the game. The game increases in difficulty as the levels progress, adding obstacles between you and the knife such as locked boxes that require finding other objects such as screws, bolts, and gears, to unlock the knife. As you progress new obstacles are added to the same basic functions, such as changing the hue and brightness of a box to match a desired color and unlock an item, spinning a wheel and stopping it in time to allow for it to land on your desired object, finding hidden numbers to enter into a calculator, moving around light bulbs to generate power, and clicking through combinations of doorways to find hidden rooms.

My second game was What’s Inside the Box, also on addictinggames.com. In this game levels are unlocked by solving a variety of different types of puzzles. The types of puzzles include: arranging sliding boxes to reveal a pattern or shape, turning dials to make a boxed- in shape, lighting up hidden lights under moving panels, spelling out words that correlate with the level, completing circles of lights according to specific orders and patterns, and pointing dials in specific directions indicated by letters (N, E, S, W).

In my opinion “What’s Inside the Box” is a better representation of puzzle games than “Old Box” is. In “Old Box” there were puzzles that needed to be solved in order to continue on with the progression of levels in the game, however they often were all the same with a couple of random tasks like the wheel spinning and color picking that were thrown in and only seen once as an added form of variety between the levels. There were often levels in which your only goal would be to repeat the same action of going into a box, retrieving an item, going back out, putting it into a machine to get another item, and repeating in order to finally unlock a box. Aside from those couple different tasks seen once or twice, the tasks were all the same and the game overall was very mindless and at times tedious due to the lack of variety. “What’s Inside the Box” however was consistent enough with its main puzzle themes, connecting them all in a way that made the game very unified, while not being to uninteresting. The levels themselves were also much more challenging both due to the variety of the types of puzzles and the variety in the way that one would go about solving the puzzles due to the multitude of the types of patterns involved in the puzzles. Overall “What’s Inside the Box” was simply much more engaging and required a lot more work to figure out clues and patterns which was much more enjoyable in comparison to the mindless clicking and repetition of “Old Box”.