Pile Up! Box by Box

In this family party game, you’ll play as a cardboard box in a pleasantly cute world. Your box can jump, stack objects on its head (generally other boxes), and it can even run and dash. Nonviolent and easy to pick up and play, Pile Up! will be a hit with the littlest gamers, and there’s a few tougher puzzles that will keep the adults entertained, too.

This game works great for an evening with friends or a rainy afternoon with the family. And therein lies its strength: it ticks everyone's boxes and anyone can play, from the littlest kids to the crankiest grandparents. It's super-easy to pick up and play, and loads of fun.

You can always play it in single-player to get in some practice, but it's much more fun in co-op mode (local only). You can invite one to three other people to join you for a game, and then you just start a level together or even drop in and drop out.

The difficulty will adapt to the number of players.

Pile Up! Box by Box is a about cute little cardboard boxes in a colourful cartoony world, but there's no real plot. Instead, your aim is to offer assistance to the boxes that ask you for help, finding lost children or all of the pieces of an outfit. Your boxes will need to stack up and work together if they're to make any progress.

For example, you might need to get everyone together at a checkpoint in order for it to open. Boxes you collected earlier might be used to activate switches, or you can seek out the trampoline box to jump up to a higher level.

There are four worlds in total, featuring boxes with different skills to help you on your way: there's a box with a tongue to grab distant items, another with springs to jump up to new heights, and yet another with a hoverboard for gliding along.

Our advice? There's no need to lug a big pile of boxes around with you everywhere you go, just in case one of them comes in useful. Some areas will make all of the items you are carrying disappear anyway.

We loved the secret areas and minigames: collect the rings found in each level to access these secret areas. There's a secret room in each of the game's worlds, as well as an arcade machine hidden in each of the four levels. If you can find it, you can play some two-player minigames.

Our advice for the youngest or rubbishest gamers: to keep it moving without getting stuck, newbies can stack their box on top of a more experienced player's. But because you can never die, if anyone gets lost then their box will instantly reappear and they can carry on with the game.

So... how do you stack up? Great in co-op and easy to play, this game is a real giftbox!