Answer Box

2 

This was a satisfying puzzle box ruined by bad construction. The sliding pins moved around unevenly, with some providing more resistance than others for no apparent reason, and eventually, I had attempted to use the solution included with the box... but to no avail. After attempting to use this without force, I eventually used a little more than I normally would, and I found out that the reason it hadn't opened correctly was that one of the corner pieces was sitting at an angle on bent internal nails. I'm really sad and frustrated because other than that, it looks beautiful, and the interior is large enough for a nice gift, but it's broken and likely beyond fixing, all for a tiny bit of wood and a couple of tiny bent nails.

2 

I was looking for a difficult puzzle box, and indeed this is very difficult. Impossible, actually. You cannot solve this puzzle without using the solution paper because it is not very well constructed. A lot of parts that should not be movable are movable from the beginning, making it impossible to tell which is the "first". Half the pieces click to let you know you did the right move, the remaining half does not. The pieces frequently shift back to its original position, and the fact that they're not distinguishable at all from each other means even if you did steps 1-12 correctly, steps 8-9 might have undone itself. Now imagine you have 42 steps. Cue going through every step repeatedly to try and catch the pieces that slid around. That is this puzzle. It's sad because if it was just a little better constructed, it would have been an amazing puzzle. It's gorgeous with plenty of space inside. But it's a bad puzzle. It's more like a safe with a password that's 42 random characters long.