With the release of Yooka-Laylee earlier this year, and now Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure, it’s starting to feel as if the 3D platforming genre of the mid to late 90s is starting to make a little bit of a comeback. With the inclusion of large, open worlds for the player to explore, challenges to overcome, and plenty of optional collectables, Unbox puts a checkmark in many of the boxes required to be considered in the same sort of company as Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie, but the question to ask is whether it does enough to encourage newer gamers to experience a genre that has seemingly fallen by the wayside, or whether, like Yooka-Laylee, Unbox offers further proof that this genre should perhaps be left in gaming history.
Unbox takes a fairly novel approach to its narrative, and also its playstyle, by having the main character being a box. Devised by and working for Global Postal Service, Newbie, your character, is invented as a self-delivery parcel, designed to cut delivery times and increase delivery accuracy by allowing the boxes themselves to do all of the work. The duration of Newbie’s Adventure is played out as a series of tests to establish just how effective these self-delivery boxes will prove to be, and as such, most of your time with the game will be spent in races, getting from point-A to point-B as quickly as possible, and overcoming the various obstacles that you might encounter on a typical delivery route.
There is an over-arching narrative, which revolves around Boss Wild, who seeks to bring down Global Postal Service, and this narrative gives you the barest of excuses to visit a couple of different locales, but the story takes a definite back seat, and aside from a few encounters with Boss Wild to mark the end of each world’s challenges, you won’t really need to concern yourself too much with him. Most of your time is instead spent meeting with your fellow GPS boxes, and these boxes provide you with the tasks that you’ll need to complete to earn stamps and progress through the game.
Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure, is an adorable game to look at, even if it does appear quite dated when compared to other recently released titles. You’re able to customize your version of Newbie, from the name to the appearance, and by completing tasks in-game you unlock extra appearance options, which are often based on the appearance of the characters you just helped out. This provides a great sense of ownership over your version of Newbie, and unlocking new options always prompted me to return to the main menu to see if I could improve on how my version looked.
For the most part, the challenges within Newbie’s Adventure are varied, and though there were only a few that I encountered that gave me genuine trouble, I found that these few had a well-balanced difficulty curve and didn’t ask me to do anything that felt unfair or that I was unprepared for. Perhaps the best example of this would be a task on the first world, Paradise Isles, where you are asked to climb to the top of the tower to retrieve a misplaced hardhat. This tower proved to be a lot taller than I initially anticipated, and climbing it becomes trickier as you get higher and higher. Though I fell off more than a few times, I never felt as if the game was asking too much of me, and my enthusiasm for the task remained pretty constant throughout, which, as someone who gets easily frustrated at games asking you to do the same thing over and over, was quite remarkable. A neat addition, which I wish was included in more games, was the fact that completing some tasks, such as turning on a giant string of fairly lights, has a permanent aesthetic effect on the world you’re in, providing even more of a sense of ownership over your own specific tale.
It’s the technical side of Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure where things start to unravel, though never to the point of a complete breakdown of its systems. It feels more like there’s a constant bubbling of uncertainty under the surface of what you’re seeing on screen, as if the game is teetering over an abyss of crashed games and deleted saves. Though I never experienced any complete hard crashes, Unbox seems to freeze for a couple of seconds on a regular basis, often around autosave points, and there were multiple occasions where the game froze long enough for me to worry that it had locked up completely, before it picked up as normal, as if nothing had happened. To be honest, this sense of uncertainty matches the general unpolished feeling of Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure, so while it certainly isn’t a positive aspect of the experience, it doesn’t exactly feel out of place.
Separate from the main story, which is a shame, as co-op in Unbox would undoubtedly be a lot of fun (though I hate to think how unstable two players would make this game), is the multiplayer mode. While it’s unlikely that you’ll invite friends over specifically to play Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure’s multiplayer mode, if you’re stuck for something to play, it can provide enough entertainment to pass an hour or two. There are five different modes, such as racing, boxing (shooting fireworks at each other), collect (collecting tape that randomly appears), oddbox and thief, along with a variety of maps, there’s enough on offer here to keep players busy for a bit, but there’s nothing genre-defining that will have you returning time and again.
One phrase that my late grandmother used to use, which stuck with me through the majority of Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure, was to label something as ‘cheap and cheerful’. This means something that isn’t necessarily well built but doesn’t cost a lot and does the job that it’s intended for, even if it doesn’t go above and beyond what’s being asked of it. This ‘cheap and cheerful’ tag matches Unbox in a number of ways and is perhaps the best way to summarize my feelings for the game in a three-word review. It’s a game that feels as if it’s sometimes mere steps away from tumbling into absolute chaos, but it’s also charming, unique, and a lot of fun to play. If you’re used to your games being polished, flawless, AAA experiences, then you might find Unbox: Newbie’s Adventure to be a little shoddy, but if you’re a little more forgiving, and willing to see the joy on offer underneath the tatty surface, you’re likely to find a good deal to enjoy.
