Boxing Clever In Unbox’s Self-Delivering Future

As various companies strive toward creating self-driving cars and Amazon heads towards a future of automated drone deliveries, what seems like the science fiction future of many a Hollywood is really not that far away. Maybe they’re just a halfway house, though? A stopping point for the next logical evolution of delivery technology?

Global Postal Service certainly thought so when, having formed one of the most successful delivery companies on the planet, they decided to cut out the middleman entirely and create self-delivering boxes. It didn’t go too well, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying and creating you, their second generation box. Unbox tells the story of your attempts to prove that you can fulfil those dreams of boxes that simply show up on your doorstep.

After a brief orientation level at Other Base – would you believe that the devs are Metal Gear Solid fans? – it’s off to the first of five worlds, a sunny little archipelago, to test your delivery skills out in the wild.

You’re just a plain box with a face from the outside, but beneath that cardboard veneer there’s clearly some of the magic of BB-8 that lets you propel yourself and roll around the world. You probably wouldn’t trust them to get an expensive case to the other side of the room, let along the other side of the world, but they are a marvel of delivering technology.

They can drive vehicles if you find one to hop into the driving seat of, for one thing, but their signature ability is to “unbox” like a spring loaded matryoshka doll, shedding a layer and sending an internal box high into the sky. That’s far from a single use ability either, and is easily repeated, so long as you make sure to pick up extra boxes to leap out of.

That’s rarely a problem, with the large and open island sporting plenty of these to keep you going and help you cross the perilous patches of water, which you’ll sink into at the second bounce.

As a platformer, it takes after the Mario 64 formula, with the previous generation of boxes acting as your quest givers and awarding you with stamps upon their completion. One minute you’ll be racing against the clock to collect rolls of tape from around a small village, the next you’ll be delivering a letter from one box to another and then returning with a second box strapped on your side, or fighting off the rival Wild Cards company’s boxes. You fight them with fireworks, which were an understandably failed propulsion system that Global Postal Service tried out, but give you ample ability to wreak havoc with the game’s destructible objects and physics.

At the centre of the small cluster of islands lies what feels like the real meat of the platforming challenge: a huge metal framework tower for you to roll and jump your way up. It’s in this semi-abstracted and pure environment that you can see whether this game feels right as a platformer, and by and large it does. You can be cautious and precise with your movements, but it’s also quite easy to misjudge things if your not careful, roll off the edge of a platform and have to use one or two unboxes to try and save yourself. The reward for your success and reaching the top is to indulge in the failure you flirted with on the way up, and fling yourself off the side and back down to the island below.

There’s something to be said for that, when you make use of the game’s box customisation. Naturally, you can pick a new colour or material to wear, but you can also stick a hat on it, pick a different face and stick it into a suit with legs and arms that flail around Octodad-style as you go about your business.

Mario 64 was the inspiration for some of the open world platforming, but it’s Mario Kart that was used as an example to explain the game’s split screen multiplayer. Prospect Games are looking to capture both sides of the enduring kart racer, with straight up races around the world, but also the battle mode, letting you loose on one another with an unlimited supply of fireworks.

Though I’m not entirely sure I’d trust Global Postal Service’s boxes to get my goods to me intact, Unbox fits into a genre that we don’t see a lot of these days and this kind of pure platforming is something I think we’ve missed. But beyond that, there’s just something quite charming about the notion of sentient boxes rolling about the world.