Our unique mashup of two seemingly disparate genres (arcade boxing and adventure) starts off with our titular, duck-headed pugilist hero Pato Box going up against his latest challenger, Kirkpatrick, and being dropped quickly in the second round. Something is very suspicious about this sudden loss of energy for our hero, who easily held his own in the first round. We regain consciousness in a pool of our own blood. Our newly introduced ally brings us to the evil corporation Deathflock’s headquarters to help us exact our revenge, and this is where our journey truly starts.
Pato Box combines the familiar behind the back camera perspective and fighting mechanics of Punch-Out with a narrative-heavy adventure game set in a black and white world of noir-style intrigue. While moving around in this odd perspective takes a little getting used to at first, but it falls into place pretty quickly. We initiate conversations with NPCs and interact with the environment by punching at them. In addition to the occasional boxing match, we will also be retrieving key items, talking to the right people, performing favors for them, and making our way across hazardous trap rooms by bobbing and weaving around lasers and electric ropes. Sometimes we find ourselves breaking up a room full of furniture, other times we will be finding giant machines and computers that power aforementioned traps and beating them to pieces to shut them down and unblock our path.
Boxing feels really good for the most part, and works well with the detached joycon’s gyro controls (although you can just use your preferred controller if you prefer not to use motion controls), but navigation of hallways is a little odd. In addition, sometimes it seems as though the hit detection on inanimate objects isn’t nearly as precise as your opponents, and other times you have to be lined up just right with an object to hit it. Even worse, you’ll have to arbitrarily destroy objects on top of another before you can hit the object itself, even if your punches line up directly with the object in question. Want to destroy a table? Too bad, you have to break the bottle of wine and three glasses on top first. This is a really minor gripe, but something to keep in mind.
Pato Box does a couple of things in an interesting way, and the story and characters are very intriguing. It has found success on other platforms leading up to this release for the Nintendo Switch, but I really feel like the motion controls add enough to the experience that it’s worth picking up to play with joy con on the Switch, especially because you can bring it with you as necessary. There are minor flaws here and there, but none of them are game breaking.
