Critical Play: Puzzles
Electric Box has players needing to figure out how to arrange given items along wires such that the main power supply is able to feed electricity to the targets.
After playing a few levels, I started to get the gist of the game in that it’s more of a puzzle than a game, since I wasn’t in direct competition with other players nor am I doing this for an overall plot goal/endgame event. At the beginning, I started off with a light-bulb and a solar panel. The game gradually introduced me to other items that would introduce a wide variety of interactions as to set off a chain reaction and finally deliver power to the destination. It was the drive of curiosity and the desire to solve as many as possible is what kept me going through the levels. I wanted to see how many levels there were and what items were revealed in each level.
A teapot? Cool, what does it do? It should release steam, right? Yes, it does! Wait, what happens if I put it next to a wind turbine? Oooo, it blew the steam over by one block. This train of thinking was common as I progressed through the game. Some aspects of the game were intuitive such as the light-bulb powering up solar panels while some weren’t as intuitive due to deviation from the power source => power receiver relationship and were found through experimenting such as utilizing a wind turbine to control the flow of steam. The deviations weren’t too drastic as to stump me for an indefinite period of time, but at the same time, they were tricky enough for me to keep guessing and clever enough for me to feel a brief rush of elation when I figured it out.
