Patrick’s Parabox
Developer/publisher Patrick Traynor
Format PC
Release Out now
Creating an infinite loop is oddly thrilling: as the surrounding environment turns black and the music fades into a wash of ambient noise, it conjures a feeling akin to finding yourself lost in the vast emptiness of space
Ata time when triple-A sandboxes are growing still larger, the proverbial mountains to which we’re promised we can go seemingly ever more distant, what a joy it is to play a game that expands your horizons within a single screen. Patrick Traynor’s devilishly clever recursive puzzler offers a succession of nested worlds that have at least one thing in common with Elden Ring: here is a game that regularly encourages you to push up against its boundaries, with a chance that you might end up somewhere unexpected. (Which isn’t to say that you should expect to get anywhere by hitting a wall 50 times.)