From his crazy over-selling of ideas that never made it into the Fable games, to the early Kinect prototype Milo, Peter Molyneux isn’t afraid to make kooky ideas come to life (or at least talk about them). His latest effort may be his most offbeat yet. In Curiosity – What’s Inside the Box, you and the rest of the world work together to chip away at a giant cube until there’s nothing left. There’s supposedly something life-changing at the end, but only the person who chips away the final piece will get to see it. For at least a few minutes, I rolled up my sleeves and chipped away with the rest of the world in this experience.
Upon downloading it, I ran into issues where the game wouldn’t let me access the cube. I think this has since been addressed, but it was unplayable during that time. Once I got in there, I realized that there isn’t really much of a game to experience. You simply tap the screen to remove squares from a giant cube one layer at a time. You’ll earn coins for removing squares, which can be used to buy tools to remove squares quicker. As a game – if you can quantify it as such – it’s boring. The act of removing squares is as banal of a task as you’ll ever face in a video game.
But then again, criticizing it for it’s moment-to-moment experience is arguably missing the point. This is more of a social experiment more than anything. You’re supposed to put yourself through this monotonous task in hopes of being the one for some supposedly life-changing thing at the end. Are you willing to put in the time to maybe be that one person who gets it? When I last logged in, over 250,000 people had already contributed to the removal of squares. If you’ve got high hopes, your odds are slimming at a brisk pace.
I like the idea of a gaming experience where people collaborate towards one common goal, but the ask from you is so boring that I can’t play this for more than 2 minutes at a time. I doubt I’ll boot this back up again, but I’m definitely curious to see what ultimately is revealed at the core of this cube.
In Third Person 