The story is, Pandora's Box is opened and seven Tricksters escape and wreck havoc on the world. And you have to put them back in by getting pieces of the box. How do you do that? Solve puzzles. Pandora's Box is divided into seven levels, each centered around a trickster. Each level involves going through five cities and completing at least one of ten puzzles in each city. One of the puzzles has the piece to the box. After every five pieces, you can capture the trickster, through a special puzzle. The special puzzles are an excuse to blow through free puzzles tokens. The later ones, anyway. They have multiple stages, which means you usually do a Overlap followed by something else. The last one deserves special consideration, being three stages and involving an Overlap, followed by a Rotascope followed by a Focus Point. Meaning for the Rotascope, a puzzle I already don't like, I wouldn't be able to see what I'm actually supposed to do, just another approximation of it.
Some puzzles already started with some pieces laid down, but I didn't really feel like this is worth mentioning in any specifically.
The outlines of figures or objects from a painting or photo are thrown into a jumbled mess and you have to unjumble them, by filling them with a particular color. This isn't a bad idea, at first. There are minor problems with aiming the cursor in tiny areas. There are some areas the game lets you ignore, but not all of them. Unfortunately, as this puzzle gets harder, instead of just making it denser, they throw in rotating the puzzle. I'm not ordinarily going to complain about this, but really? I never felt sick, but I did feel discomfort, discomfort I don't feel in shooters. There were also some where you could only see part of the puzzle as it scrolled along a cylinder. Most of the later ones aren't fun puzzles, they're just tedious.
An image is scrambled up, and by swapping the pieces with each other the image gradually reshapes. The trick is that each location is of a different size. I feel like this one was the best (not the most fun, that would be Outer Layer) designed puzzle, and the amount of them agrees with me.
Match the moving holes to the image underneath. Basically, the moving holes correspond to a section of the painting/photo, and you have to figure out where. Only problem is, you can't see the image. If that sounds terrible, that's because it is. I didn't play this one too much, I just used a puzzle win token whenever I had to go through one. Later ones get pretty tiny.
The manual says "Fill the shape without letting the seven pieces overlap." Which is a useless piece of advice, since if they overlap, you aren't going to be winning anyway. You have to fit the seven pieces into a particular arrangement, or shape, if you will. This one felt out of place. Unlike the others, the image is entirely pointless. The pieces don't have any images on them, because if they did there wouldn't be any puzzle. This one appeared fairly late in the game. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad, it just made the later sections less crap.
You rebuild an image from strips. After the first couple of levels, there was always one of these in each city. Some were good, some were bad, but the puzzle never wore out its welcome, despite a few zingers.
A puzzle where you put a piece in various lenses to rotate it to the correct orientation. They range in size from, reasonable large, to, screw you, I'm tiny. It doesn't actually matter if you know where the piece goes as long it can connect to the pieces on the board. Which means you can just spam the buttons until you complete the puzzle. Which I did, because this was boring.
You need to redo the surface of an object. Its hard to explain, but when you look at it, it isn't confusing at all. You need to have the object return to its normal look, because some of the "pieces" of the surface have fallen off. You need to put the pieces back onto the sections they fell off of. There were times when visibility was compromised, both in the too dark sense and in just not being able to see a particular area. That wasn't too bad until the last one. I never really felt like I was being treated unfairly.
You rebuild an image by a series of pieces. These pieces are corner pieces, and you can rotate them. Some pieces had a piece of the background and not the image, which was a clever idea. Overlaps were by far the most common puzzle, although I could be wrong.
Its like one of those sliding puzzles, except its in a series of rings. I don't like sliding puzzles. I really, really, really, really, don't like sliding puzzles. Some of the early ones are okay, when it was only two rings of four or six, but when it came to three rings, I just tapped out.
I find the description actually fits here "Rebuild an object by rotating, flipping, and stacking the slices." I feel like there was a drastic change in difficulty between the easier and the harder puzzles.
I guess I would recommend this game, despite getting extremely tedious in later stages. Just don't feel compelled to finish it. There was also just a puzzle mode, but as I didn't check that out before I finished the game I don't know if that lets you play without completing them first.
*Make your jokes about communists and capitalists here.
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