Have You Played... Pato Box?

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Have You Played… Pato Box?Quack attack

Quack attack

Pato Boxis… lord. What’s the best way to describe a hybrid of a dystopian graphic novel with Punch-Out about a boxer with the head of a duck who sets out to destroy the secret society of assassins that betrayed him?

I mean, it’s fun as well, but honestly. Throw me a bone here, game.

I’ve described plenty of games as “surreal”, butPato Boxreally earns it. It’s not just wacky incongruent things like having the head of a duck (and nobody really making that big a deal of it). It has the consistent, low-thrumming tone of a nightmare scenario that even some far more self-serious dystopian fiction lacks.

Pato Box is stabbed in the back and left for dead, and gradually punches his way up the sinister corporate boxing/gambling/mad science world seeking revenge, justice, or maybe just a continuance of his purpose: to punch. The weave and parry and jab and pound. He’s a tragic, faintly haunted character in a bleak world, an aheroic hero, an avatar of combined fury and fatalism, and he has the head of a duck.