You are in a box. The box contains other boxes. Some of those boxes contain this box. You can push boxes into boxes, enter boxes from the outside, exit boxes from within, and eventually confront a box that contains itself — an infinite recursive loop rendered as a navigable space. It's boxes all the way down.

Patrick's Parabox is a Sokoban-style puzzle game built around a single mechanical idea: recursion. The player pushes boxes on a grid, as in any block-pushing puzzle game. The innovation is that any box can contain a world, and any world can be entered. Pushing a box into another box from the outside changes the contents of that box as seen from within it. Entering a box means navigating its interior world. A box can contain a copy of the world that contains it, creating a paradox that is somehow perfectly consistent and solvable. Over 350 hand-crafted puzzles introduce each variation of this idea one at a time, from the approachable to the brain-melting, with no filler — every puzzle exists to demonstrate something new about the system. Patrick Traynor developed the entire game solo over several years, and it won the IGF Excellence in Design award in 2020 before its 2022 release. Priscilla Snow's soundtrack evolves to reflect each new mechanic introduced.

Key Features: • Recursive box-pushing: enter any box, push worlds from within, boxes that contain themselves • 350+ hand-crafted puzzles, each introducing a new idea with no filler • Minimal clean aesthetic - Compositor Priscilla Snow: music evolves with new mechanics • Free demo available • IGF Excellence in Design 2020 - IndieCade Developers Choice 2019