The Quick Brown Box: Cubetractor Demo
Before crates became the favoured furniture and fortification of first-person army-men and space marines, they were referred to simply as 'blocks' or 'cubes' and hung around on puzzle game backlots, hoping to be hired as extras. Occasionally an evenly sided box with no distinguishing features would land a role in Tetris but mostly they made up the numbers in the likes of Chip's Challenge or the word's saddest game, Sokoban*. That brings me to Cubetractor. The demo threatened to chase me from its confines almost immediately - it's a game about pulling blocks into new positions - but it quickly won me over, revealing that it is in fact a puzzle-action tower assault game, with turrets, explosions and disobedient robots. That demo is available on Steam.
The demo's a decent enough size and left me eager to see how far I'd be able to progress before feeling old/slow/stupid, which is my eventual fate in all things. I can't linger with the boxes though - I have uprisings to deal with in another world. Bearded uprisings.
*Sokoban may not actually be a series of puzzle games, but rather an experimental and soul-crushing Kafka story about the delusions and despair of an anxious warehouse manager. If that's the case, I give it loads out of ten.