Unbox: Newbie's Adventure

I came to Unbox: Newbie's Adventure expecting something squarely outside my wheelhouse, and I got exactly that. This is a third-person 3D collectathon built around rolling a sentient cardboard box across three open island worlds, collecting stamps to unlock boss fights and hunting down 200 pieces of gold tape per level. My kind of game it is not, but as someone who spends most of his time thinking about polling rates and headshot hitboxes, I can at least tell you whether the core loop holds together. The one thing Prospect Games genuinely nailed is the "unboxing" traversal mechanic. You can chain up to six consecutive jumps by shedding a layer of cardboard each time, burning your health bar to gain air. When it clicks, you are launching yourself from one island shoreline to another, chaining momentum mid-air and actually having to think about when to burn a jump versus land safely. That is a legitimately interesting risk-reward system, and it is the best reason to fire this up. The problem is everything around it. Rolling as a box on uneven terrain means constant snagging on stairs, rocks, and map geometry. The camera is unreliable during fast movement, and precision platforming sections fight the floaty physics the entire time. The three worlds - Paradise Isles, Parcel Peaks, and Isla Cartulina - are visually bright and reasonably large. Mission variety covers time trials, races, climbing challenges, and item-retrieval tasks, but the mission pool runs dry fast. Enemies called Wild Cards exist to slow you down, and the slam attack that deals with them is so inconsequential it might as well not be there. If you mainline the story content and boss fights, reviewers clock roughly five to seven hours. The real playtime sink is going after all 800 Golden Tapes across the worlds, and those unlock cosmetics only - new hats and faces for your box via the Box-o-Matic customisation menu. The reward loop for completionists is thin. Local multiplayer runs up to four players across 11 stripped-down maps with five modes including a deathmatch (Boxing), a capture-and-hold variant (Oddbox), a coin-stealing mode (Thief), a tape-collection race (Collect), and a straight delivery race. The modes are functional and carry some of the same chaotic energy as the traversal system, but they inherit all the control and camera issues from the main game. There is no online multiplayer, which in 2024 and beyond makes this a couch-gaming-only proposition for the social side of the package. At a 68 Metacritic, the critical consensus lands where you would expect: decent concept, rough execution, clearly aimed at younger players and casual platforming fans rather than anyone who has already put time into A Hat in Time or the modern Crash remasters. If you have a kid who wants an approachable collect-a-thon with a goofy premise and zero violent content, this fits the bill. If you are buying it for yourself because the traversal system sounds interesting, go in with managed expectations and a firm awareness that the controls will frustrate you before the movement ever feels good.

Fred · Scout Team

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