Unboxathon Review
Click to unpack loot from boxes to buy more boxes and unpack more loot in Unboxathon.
Unboxathon. Credit: Evil Corp Games
Unboxathon from Evil Corp Games is an incremental game that exploits the dopamine hit of opening boxes from Amazon. If you’ve played other incremental games, you know what to expect. It’s brief and mostly fun, with an execution that doesn’t meet the possibilities of its concept.
Pop bubbles to earn boxes. Open boxes to unpack and find items and crystal shards. Sell the items for cash, and spend everything to buy upgrades and access bigger, better boxes. It kept me busy for a little over 3 hours, with only one Steam achievement going unearned.
Unboxathon. Credit: Evil Corp Games
Upgrades include a faster box cutter, greater efficiency with bubble popping, higher tiers of shredded paper that will also earn you money, and more. The game’s theme is fun and full of possibilities. However, there are issues that undermine the experience and let down that theme. Why should better packing material take longer to remove? Near the endgame, it feels like it takes forever to unpack a box. Unboxathon needed either different points of friction or more ways to mitigate that kind of tedium. The game’s core action of unpacking should feel snappy and satisfying, not laborious.
Unboxathon. Credit: Evil Corp Games
The game lacks enough automation. Only bubble popping and a half-baked alchemy system can run automatically. The latter lets you convert crystals to energy that produces sellable items; I never found it worthwhile or compelling. In an incremental game, automation should be a payoff for all the grinding, but Unboxathon never delivers.
The amount of content feels thin. The variety of items you find in the boxes could have been greater; there aren’t that many box types, and the items for each one are limited. It makes the game feel like it’s Early Access rather than a full release. I can imagine more room for variety and a deeper upgrade tree.
Unboxathon. Credit: Evil Corp Games
The game features a charming pixel art presentation that doesn’t feel fully fleshed out. While the pixel art is nice, it exists in an abstract UI; it would have been far more effective to go further with the visual design and place the game in an actual setting with a more tactile quality. A bedroom or even a warehouse would have been preferable to a UI floating in space. At least the UI is easy to understand.
Unboxathon. Credit: Evil Corp Games
Unboxathon is an incremental game that doesn’t live up to its promising theme. It feels like it needs more time in the oven to reach the level of some of my favorite games in the genre.
Unboxathon will be available on Steam on December 8, 2025.
Overall Score: 4/10
Played on: Steam Deck
