Blackbox - Think Outside the Box

Do you ever look at a game and think 'damn, I wish I'd thought of that?' Blackbox may well be the absolute pinnacle of that for me; a fiendishly clever, utterly unique puzzle game that must have been a piece of piss to code.

Blackbox's premise is simple - it's an iPhone game you play without touching the screen. If you're wondering how the hell that could even possibly work, then that's exactly what the game wants; it simply gives you that idea and leaves you to your own devices. There's a grid with a bunch of lights on it, and you need to select a light and then work out how to switch it on based on trial and error and, at most, a very vague clue. Your job is to stop thinking of Blackbox as a video game and to start thinking of your iPhone as a piece of hardware, to start exploring all the things it can do, all the information it holds, and all the stimuli it can react to. It is undeniably avant-garde, potentially as much as it's possible for a mobile game to be, but just as importantly, it's gleeful in its desire to frustrate and annoy the hell out of the person playing it, to make them feel helpless when they can't work out what to do and like a total idiot once they figure it out.

My job revolves around smartphones, and I have some experience with coding and the SDK and API suites available to iOS developers, so I would imagine that I probably have an advantage over most people when it comes to playing this - and even with that, this game left me totally stumped half the time. Some of the puzzles are outrageously difficult to figure out - one in particular requires you to open the puzzle on a day with a full moon, then again on a day with a new moon, and how the hell was I meant to know how I'd solved the first half of that apparently without doing anything? Others, however, made me feel like an absolute douche once the penny dropped; all I'll say in my defence about these is that playing on a train makes some of these puzzles straight-up impossible to figure out. If that feels too cryptic, then well, that's what Blackbox is all about. You'll forge a love-hate relationship with it that may well fall down on the site of hate more often than not, but when all's said and done, it's a brilliant concept that can scarcely have been executed better,