Out of the Box
Every escape becomes part of you.
A circle, a box, and a way out. Twenty-five rooms of neon geometry where the walls move, the gaps run away from you and something is usually chasing. Clear a room and its border folds into a ring you carry with you.
About the game
Out of the Box is a minimalist action-puzzle game about leaving rooms that do not want you to. You are a circle. Around you is a box with a way out somewhere in it. Between the two is whatever that particular room has decided to be: a gap that slides away as you approach, a drone that mirrors your position across the arena, a launch pad that throws you further than you meant to go, a floor that carries you, a room inside the room.
There are sixteen mechanics and twenty-five stages across five tiers, and the stages are built to teach by combination rather than by lecture. A tier one room is a little room with an opening. By tier five you are reading four things at once and deciding which of them to use.
Every escape leaves a mark. When you clear a room, its border folds inward and becomes a ring inside your circle, and you carry it into the next one. The last stage is called Everything you carry, and by then you are a dense little set of rings that were all rooms you got out of.
It moves quickly. After the first playtest the circle was made twice as fast, with the chasers sped up to match, so a room is a run of decisions rather than a long walk across it. It is quick to fail and quicker to try again: dying restarts the room you are in on the next tick, and nothing you have already cleared is taken away. The circle is yours to colour, the motion can be turned down, and it plays the same on a keyboard, a controller, a mouse or a touchscreen, in landscape, on a desktop or a phone.
It is built in Godot, it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux with mobile presets in the project, and it is in development. There is no store page and no release date.
- Genre
- Minimalist action-puzzle
- Status
- In development
- Platforms
- Steam and PC, with mobile
- Engine
- Godot 4.5
What it is
- 01
Twenty-five rooms, five tiers
Each stage is one room and one way out. They start as a box with an opening and end as several ideas at once: a room inside a room, a border that sticks, a floor that moves you, and something following while you work it out. The order teaches by combination rather than by tutorial. Some rooms make you choose before you move: three launch lanes side by side, one chain of pads that reaches the exit and two that end at a wall that kills you, all of it drawn before you commit to a lane.
- 02
Sixteen mechanics that change the question
Launch pads, chasers, mirror drones that reflect your position, gaps that flee along a wall, rotating gaps, conveyors, darkness, inverted control, shrinking boxes, nested boxes, sticky borders, switch doors, restart traps and mimic boxes that copy your movement a moment late. Every one of them changes where the exit actually is.
- 03
A ring for every room
Clear a room and its border folds inward, rounds off and settles inside your circle as a ring — pulled in quickly now, with an elastic pulse, two ripples spreading out and a rising three-note chime. You carry it into the next stage, and the one after that, so the circle you are steering at stage twenty-five is a record of everything you got out of. Reduced motion keeps the moment, without the expansion.
- 04
Fail fast, start again faster
A hazard restarts the room on the next tick, not the run. Cleared stages stay cleared, manual restarts do not count as deaths, and the game keeps your best time and whether you did it without dying.
- 05
Your circle, your settings
Colour the circle from a wheel or the presets and watch the rings change with it. Reduced motion calms the presentation, removing camera tilt and trails and settling the background, without changing a single collision or timing.
- 06
Keyboard, controller, mouse or thumbs
One landscape layout on every device, so the arena and the controls stay where you expect them. Touch targets are sized through viewport scaling, and safe areas are handled for phones.
Trailer
Sixty seconds of getting out
Cut from the game's own recorded solutions, rendered from the current build at 1920x1080, with a few screenshots for the screens you do not play. Everything in it is still in development.
Screenshots
Rooms, and the way out
Rendered from the current build by the game's own capture tool. The stage captions are the stages' real names.
Status
In development
Twenty-five stages, sixteen mechanics and the full presentation pass are in the build, and the first playtest pass — faster movement, branching routes, harder Extreme rooms — is in as well. The next one is another round of human playtesting. There is no store page and no release date yet, so there is nothing to wishlist; the devlog is where updates appear.
Current focus
- All 25 stages
- Playtest tuning
- Presentation pass
- Platform work
- Mobile controls
