Home Page / pc / P / Pandora's Box / Preview Listing / Preview

“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.”

The creator of this masterpiece of puzzling play is Alexey Pajitnov, also known for the highly addictive Tetris. Pandora’s Box, however, is more of an interactive jigsaw puzzle that challenges visual recognition by taking advantage of the available technology to create curved surface and overlay puzzles. In general, anything that you can do graphically with an image, Pandora’s Box uses to add to the visual challenge.

“Your first mission is to capture Maui, the trickster hero of Hawaii. This is the story of how Maui played a trick and pulled the Hawaiian islands from the sea. Maui was a skilled shape changer, but when he was a boy his four older brothers left him behind every time they went fishing. “You’re always playing tricks, and you never catch any fish,” they told him. One day however, Maui had a plan.”

So begins your journey around the world. The story centers on the seven tricksters you must capture and the mythology behind their existence. With each locale that is visited, the player is presented with 10 puzzle types with over 350 challenging variations. The puzzles become progressively more difficult as you move through the game, helping to provide hours of addictive gameplay.

Each of the puzzles that you attempt to solve represents the city in which you find them. While searching for Maui, for instance, I started off in New York. The puzzles I solved included Times Square and the Statue of Liberty as backdrops. In each city, you will find puzzles that represent a piece of the city or its culture. Clues are randomly hidden within each city. Solving one of the ten available puzzles may reveal the clue and once found, the story line advances and you are given the chance to move to a new city.