Love: A Puzzle Box Filled with Stories

Love is a warm but brief puzzle game about playing with time and fate and people's lives.

LOVE – A Puzzle Box Filled with Stories has such a clever concept implemented in a unique way — who would have thought to make a game focused on a building’s past and present, its windows open for players to peek inside and see how love grows or wanes over time? Unfortunately, this labor of love was a little hard to understand, its stories only sometimes resonating through confusing feedback and cluttered scenes. If you’re here for puzzles, you may want to pass this one up (or at least give it a go on your PC); if you prefer sentimental stories above gameplay, then let love conquer all and give LOVE – A Puzzle Box Filled with Stories a shot.

LOVE – A Puzzle Box Filled with Stories is a short game, I completed it in well under an hour. That brings me to another niggle I have with the game. At the full price of £19.99/$19.99/€19,99 the game is way overpriced for what you get. Yes, it does have an interesting mechanism of moving the room around but the novelty of that soon wears off when you are not that connected to the characters in the game. The music in the game is lovely but again it’s something that you like the first time but not when you hear it constantly on repeat. On a side note, LOVE – A Puzzle Box Filled with Stories is on sale in the eShop until 7th November, so if you do want to try it out now would be a good time to purchase it.

Love: A Puzzle Box Filled With Stories is a point-and-click puzzle game that sees the player finding love for others within an interactable apartment block. Is this a neighbourhood worth moving into? Find out in this Rapid Review.

Storytelling can take place in a wide variety of forms, and the breadth of games with a focus in that are on the Switch has been quite remarkable...

I really liked this game from the get-go, but I slowly became confused with the puzzle-solving aspect and hoped that there was more to it than what was presented. The soundtrack is great and having a fully visual story that could tug at the heartstrings really made the game shine. Sadly, some backstory and some context could’ve been provided with some text and would not completely take away from the emotional experience.

LOVE is a charming game that ties a time bending puzzle box to a lattice of interwoven dioramas that await the player’s intervention. It’s like a Rubik’s cube but instead of coloured tiles, there’s bite sized narrative adventures to uncover. Not all of the stories are impactful because they’re told exclusively though character gesticulations rather than text or vocal performances but more than enough stick the landing to make this a satisfying experience.

LOVE warms the heart