Review by: Bob Mandel
Published: September 25, 1999

As a game reviewer, I am afraid my most common emotional reaction during my endless hours of playing and testing is disappointment. After hearing for months the hype about a forthcoming product, I am bursting at the seams with anticipation for it, full of the very highest expectations for its performance. Then I get to see a beta or demo version, and while everything is usually not as I’d hoped, I quickly dismiss the flaws by rationalizing that they will be fixed in the final version. Finally the release emerges, and more often than not I am crushed that an initially promising concept fell short in its execution.

The nice thing is that there are exceptions to every rule. When I first heard about Pandora’s Box from Microsoft, I became filled with excitement because the great Russian puzzler Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, was the designer. When I saw the pre-release version at the end of June, it exceeded my expectations by a large margin. Now that I have the final product, I am completely blown away. This is so much better than Microsoft’s last foray into puzzling, Microsoft Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle Collection, that the two offerings do not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.

Having a central story, which is uncommon in this particular genre, makes this puzzler so much more intriguing. It all begins with the famous Greek legend of Pandora’s Box. Seven tricksters from different cultural traditions around the world have escaped from the box, and they take great delight in mixing everything up. Your goal in solving the puzzles is to follow the tricksters around the world, locate the key missing pieces, and return them all to Pandora’s Box. You visit a series of cities, each of which has a set of puzzles, a piece of the box, and hidden bonuses. When you find all of the pieces for a side of the box, you are ready to capture a trickster. Without this plot, just solving a large series of puzzles for no reason other than the intellectual challenge would not be nearly as enticing.

The bonuses provide significant incentives for solving extra puzzles beyond the one that contains a missing piece of the box. For example, you may collect hints, which you may use to place a piece if you get stuck, and free puzzle tokens, which you may use to solve any puzzle if you need help. This is not at all like having cheat codes built into the play, as you really have to work to collect the bonuses. Believe me, these really come in handy for getting past some of the more challenging puzzles.