I went on a bit of a food-related games buying frenzy over the weekend and picked up three food-related puzzle or strategy games. Whilst these games will all get reviewed to see which is a sweet treat, and which is a dog’s dinner, I can confirm that my early thoughts place Pack My Luchbox into the weakest of the three so far.
Pack My Lunchbox asks you do just that. There are 50 written notes detailing what each person wants for lunch. Up to four items will need to be selected per lunch: a main, a sweet, a snack, and a drink. You’ll need to decipher what type of food each person wants through their written clues, and it turns this puzzler into a bit of a deduction game. A note may say they want something light but without meat for a main, and something chocolatey for a sweet. Instantly, you’ll be shoving an omelette and a chocolate cake slice in the lunchbox. Some puzzles will have multiple solutions, as the clues will be akin to “something salty and a fruit juice”, giving you a selection of four drinks to pick from.
As absolutely everything in this game comes down to the contents of the note, I ran into what could be either cultural or language translation issues whenever the notes became less descriptive. For example, for one of the fast food days, the note said it’s a fast food classic. I assumed it meant burger and fries (chips for me in the UK), but that option was rejected. Instead, it was fried chicken and mashed potatoes – a fast food combo I’d never heard of! A few of these types of notes repeatedly ground me to a halt because the cultural reference was lost on me.
I also found that dropping two items into the lunchbox was fiddlier than I expected. Sometimes, instead of putting in an item side-by-side, it just replaced what was already there. It was as if where I expected the item detection to allocate the food item to the top half of the lunchbox was much higher (and actually above) the visual of the lunchbox. That meant when I visually lined up my item just above halfway up the lunchbox, it just replaced what I’d already put in the bottom half. I also found the menus for selecting items slightly fiddly, too. The pastel colours work well for the artwork of the food, but using them to grab the narrow menu sliders to view other items meant you’d have two very light shades of a colour that didn’t visually pop.
These are minor niggles, but because the entire game is based around these two actions, it made Pack My Lunchbox less enjoyable than I expected. The 50 levels can be completed in an hour, but the game’s main menu currently has a message saying that the game is soon to be expanded to allow for more lunches and food variation. That will be a good thing, as long as they make the menu slider a bit wider to make it easier to spot and grab. I like the idea of Pack My Lunchbox, but its execution doesn’t quite help the concept live up to expectations. A bit like a meal deal to be honest…
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