The gods gave Pandora many gifts- beauty, cleverness, curiosity. But their most dangerous gift was a beautiful puzzle box. When opened, it would release the spirits of chaos and mischief into the world, which is exactly what they wanted. And so it was that seven tricksters escaped and scattered to the ends of the Earth. Hiding pieces of the box and scrambling everything they touched. Follow the tricksters around the world, find the missing pieces and return them to Pandora's Box.
—Intro cinematic
Pandora's Box is a Puzzle Game developed by Microsoft Game Studios, created with the help of Alexey Pajitnov (the Russian dude who created Tetris), and released for PC in 1999. The game is mostly played with a mouse, though occasionally some keyboard buttons could/should also be used. Plot is very simple (read above, that's basically it) though the gameplay is what really shines here, with amazingly rendered images and objects turned into puzzles which the players has to assemble. This is how it goes— you are an adventurer who found the Box of Pandora at an antique shop and so it's your objective to find and (re)capture all the seven tricksters which escaped from the box. Here's how it goes: first you search around in 4 random cities, in each of them you have 10 puzzles to solve and 1 of each 10 puzzles has a piece of the box hidden behind it; after you find the first 4 pieces, then you have to find the trickster in their home city and solve 10 more puzzles, as well as 1 special "trickster's challenge" puzzle before you catch the mischievous spirit (which serve as the game's "boss battles" and are way harder than regular puzzles). While the formula doesn't change much during the seven levels, it's still quite a long, challenging, pleasing and engaging video game. There are 4 modes of gameplay- Story (complete the game's campaign), Tutorial (learn how to solve the 10 different puzzle types), Gallery (compete for best time records with all your save files and other players) and Puzzles Only (replay any/every puzzle in the game with no restrictions and music). Please do not confuse this with the 1929 German silent drama film and/or the second Professor Layton adventure puzzle game.
The majority of puzzle types in the game are variations on the basic concept of a tiling puzzle, and often involve famous works of art like paintings, statues, photos of notable places around the world, or other artifacts:
- Find and Fill is a puzzle where outlines of elements of an image are overlapped with each other, and the player must find and color elements, like a coloring book.
- Focus Point is a tiling puzzle where the player must switch tiles of a jumbled image to restore the original picture; however, tiles are of different size, and they stretch or squeeze if placed into a larger or smaller slot.
- Image Hole is a puzzle where the final image is invisible except through constantly moving holes that are the shapes of various elements of the image; the player must guide the holes to their correct places and lock them.
- Interlock is a triangle-based dissection puzzle.
- Jesse's Strips is a jigsaw puzzle where pieces may overlap each other; pieces are also distributed among five different trays that filter out certain colors of the image.
- Lens Bender is a puzzle where the player must reconstruct an image by placing the pieces under various lens until they are distorted into a shape where they connect with each other.
- Outer Layer is a puzzle where the player must place parts of a texture back on a 3D object.
- Overlap is a jigsaw puzzle where pieces may overlap each other; some pieces contain parts of the background pattern for the easier initial placement.
- Rotascope is a sliding puzzle that places the tiles on multiple concentric circles.
- Slices provides the player with a 3D object that was broken up to slices horizontally; the player must rotate the pieces and rebuild the object in the correct order.
Tropes appearing in this puzzle box game:
- 100% Completion: The game holds track of how many puzzles you have solved (all 350 or 400 of them), how many tokens and hints you have, did you used any of them when solving the puzzles and how long it took you to complete each and every one of them which even for an experienced player could take up to an entire whopping 12 hours.
- All Myths Are True: The seven tricksters are Maui, Puck, Eris, Coyote, Monkey, Anansi and Raven. The opening cinematic also says "gods" without specifying if they are Greco-Roman, which implies that all the gods of all the pantheons created the box and gave it to Pandora, this would also double as example of Crossover Cosmology.
- Big Bad Ensemble: The game has seven villains, working independently from each other.
- Bowdlerise: Averted, the tricksters' tales aren't censored (e.g. Nick Bottom in Puck's story is called an "ass", even though it's just the old word for "donkey") and many nude statues/paintings of humans appear despite this being an E-rated game. Admittedly, the images are cropped and pixelated enough so the naughty bits aren't too visible.
- Book Ends: Sort of, the game's first city is New York and the last one is also in North America, which is Vancouver in Canada.
- Chaos Is Evil: Downplayed, more like "chaos is a huge nuisance" though it still has to be stopped.
- Cool Mask: Coyote and Raven both wear one, though given how they are magical animalistic indigenous american trickster gods these masks could also actually be their heads and faces.
- Cosy Catastrophe: There are prankster spirits hiding among the people and messing up with the world's natural order! Don't mind them, you have better things to do... like maybe, solving puzzles.
- Creator Provincialism: Downplayed, however the player visits two cities in Russia, which is the country of the game's creator who helped with Microsoft developing this game— Alexey Pajitnov.
- Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: Plenty of the tricksters' ingame stories have this trope, befitting their nature. Anansi is an exception because he got tricked by a tortoise instead, even though one of his myths has him scamming the sky god Nyame which is a straighter example of this trope.
- Eiffel Tower Effect: The backgrounds of all the cities are famous landmarks and many puzzles are based on famous works of art coming from that region. Curiously, the Mona Lisa doesn't appear despite being possibly the most famous painting in the world and the French city of Paris is even visited twice.
- Excuse Plot: It can be summed up as this: long ago, seven evils were unleashed from their can and now you must search for them and seal them back in the MacGuffin so that order can return to the world. And you have to do it by solving puzzles.
- Foregone Victory: It's impossible to fail this game and the only thing you lose is your time. Granted, you could just opt not bothering with solving all the puzzles in the game and when you complete a level they will be permanently lost but it's optional. The exception to this are the speed challenge puzzles- if you take too long, pause/reset/exit/forfeit and/or use a token/hint, kiss your 3 free tokens reward goodbye.
- Gotta Catch Them All: The seven tricksters, obviously. The puzzles themselves also count, as well as all the pieces of the puzzle box. Arguably, the hints and tokens also count- hints can help with a single piece in a puzzle and are given randomly while tokens can solve an entire puzzle instantly and you get 1 for every 10 puzzles you solve, though you need 3 tokens to solve 1 trickster's challenge puzzle.
- Guide Dang It!: Without prior knowledge of their locations, you will have difficulty locating every hidden box piece, free hint and puzzle token. However, you can just choose to go the long hard route and solve all the game's over 300 puzzles instead.
- Hidden Track: Examination of the files reveals a single piece of music (this
) which doesn't ever play ingame. Presumably, it would have been used in Raven's trickster challenge puzzle. - Instant-Win Condition: If you solve 10 puzzles (some random puzzles may also have a token hidden behind them) or solve the speed challenge ones after finding the city's box piece (which gives you 3 tokens), you get 1 puzzle token. It can be used to solve any puzzle in a second, regardless how difficult it is; however trickster puzzles require 3 tokens and later ones have multiple phases which means you need at least 6 tokens.
- It's Up to You: While there aren't many characters, only the player/protagonist bothers with tracking down and sealing back all the escaped tricksters. Granted seeing as they are chaos incarnate and constantly deceive other people, the tricksters could be very difficult to deal with and most sane people couldn't bother with doing all of this weirdness.
- Jerkass Gods: The opening narration outright states that Pandora opening the box and releasing chaos into the world is exactly what all the deities wanted.
- Lighter and Softer: In the original myth, Pandora brought all suffering to humankind (mortality, diseases, poverty, insanity, etc). Here, she just unleashed seven spirits that cause pranks for their own amusement.
- Lucky Seven: Inverted! There are seven tricksters who embody chaos, which is evil-ish.
- Metapuzzle: Across the playable cities, there are puzzles that contain the pieces of the Box of Pandora the main character received at the start of the game. When gathering at least four pieces, you can make use of them to find the tricksters that escaped from the box prior to the events of the game; and to capture each trickster, you not only have to solve more puzzles along the way, but also complete a special trickster challenge that is considerably more difficult to solve.
- Minimalist Cast: The seven tricksters are more like stage bosses, Pandora is a Posthumous Character and the gods are only mentioned offhand. The protagonist adventurer has no appearance or characterization because that's supposed to be the player himself/herself, while there is also a storyteller woman that provides the only (offscreen) voice in the game (in case you are wondering, she is voiced by Cynthia Jones).
- Mundane Made Awesome: Simply put, you seal Reality Warper-type spirits into a small box just by solving puzzles. If only it was that easy done...
- No Fair Cheating: Used a free token or a hint on a speed challenge puzzle? No bonus reward for you!
- Only Known by Their Nickname: One of the tricksters ingame is called "Monkey" and hails from China. Savvy players will recognize that it's the Monkey King from Journey to the West, in other words- it's actually Sun Wukong. Of course, because Sun Wukong translated means "Monkey King", this makes it also an example of You Are the Translated Foreign Word.
- Production Throwback: The pieces in the Interlock-type puzzles visually resemble Tetris pieces.
- Public Domain Artefact: Cue Title Drop— it's Pandora's Box! Doubles as a pun, since it's a literal (puzzle) box here.
- Pun: How are the spirits kept from wreaking havoc around? By keeping them locked up in Pandora's Box. Which happens to be in this case a toy/puzzle box.
- Regional Riff: There are 2 music tracks (one for the city menu screen and one when playing a puzzle) for each of the 14 major areas of the world (besides Antarctica, for obvious reasons): British Isles, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, Russia, Greece, India, East Asia, Egypt and the Middle East, Africa, Australia and Oceania, North America, and lastly Central and South America. Greece and India are only visited once.
- Sadly Mythtaken: It's wasn't a (puzzle) box that Pandora opened, it was a jar. It didn't have seven trickster gods in it either, though in that case there won't exist a premise for this game in the first place so better chalk it up to the
MST3K Mantra. - Sealed Evil in a Can: More like "sealed chaos in a can", bonus points for it being directly (if loosely based) on the current page image. The objective is to reseal said "evil" in the can, however the ending implies this cycle will repeat...
- Sea Serpents: In the world map◊, occasionally one will appear swimming in the oceans. It's green with triangular back spikes and a dolphin-esque head, though it cannot be interracted with and only serves as a cool visual decoration.
- Serial Escalation: The puzzles get more complex the further you are in the game. The trickster challenges also increase in difficulty and length- the first 4 have only one phase, the 5th and 6th have two phases, while the 7th (and last boss) has three phases.
- Take Your Time: Besides the speed challenge puzzles, there is no penalty in wasting time solving most of the puzzles (including the trickster's challenges) even though the game still has a timer that records how much time you spend on each puzzle. This also applies to the story— trickster gods running around in the world, causing mischief and chaos? Bah, they can wait because you can just don't wanna bother doing anything about it.
- The End... Or Is It?: After capturing the seventh and last trickster (Raven), the game ending cutscene depicts the box returned into its antique shop. But the top of the box opens and a glow comes out.
- Storyteller: "Congratulations! You have captured the spirits of mischief and restored order to the world! But remember: a little bit of chaos is a necessary part of life, and chaos will always find a way..."
- Timed Mission: Starting with the second level, most cities will have 1 "speed puzzle"- if you beat it under the specified time, you will get 3 puzzle tokens. However, there is a catch- you must solve it before finding the puzzle box piece, otherwise solving the speed puzzle will just reveal the piece's location. Plus, you mustn't use any hints or tokens, pause or quit the speed puzzle otherwise you will forfeit and fail the speed challenge.
- The Smurfette Principle: Apart from possibly the player, there are only 3 female characters in the game: one is Pandora herself (albeit posthumously), the storyteller (who is only a voice and never physically appears onscreen) and the goddess Eris, one of the seven trickster spirits.
- Trickster God: The seven main antagonists are these, being Public Domain Characters of real-world mythologies and literature. Granted, it's debatable if these are true gods or just spirits/daemons and/or minor deities. Bizarrely, the game lacks more famous trickster gods like Seth, Loki and Tezcatlipoca.
- Updated Re Release: One year after it was released, this game was was re-released in a "Puzzle Game of the Year Edition", containing an actual wooden/paper box as a gift parcel-esque casing◊ and having an additional 50 puzzles.
