A Sokoban that Functions but has Very Little of Interest to Say
The most interesting thing about Book It! is that it very firmly believes that the “shhh” sound that librarians make is spelled “shiiii”. Push a book onto a desk in this sokoban and the main character holds a finger up to his lips and unleashes a “shiiii”. Makes me giggle every time, which probably says more about how juvenile I am than anything else.
Unfortunately, the rest of Book It! isn’t quite as remarkable. It may not be published by Afil Games – this is a Tyneforge Games and Little Giant joint – but it feels almost exactly like one of their sokoban games, from the Level Select menu to the price to the way the Undo and Retry features are implemented. To someone who reviews most of the budget sokoban that arrives on the Xbox, Book It! is astonishingly familiar.
Another of Life’s Crate Mysteries
For the uninitiated, Book It! is a sokoban, which effectively means ‘warehouse keeper’ in Japanese. That makes sense because you’re often shoving boxes or crates around a warehouse floor, attempting to socket them in a goal. In Book It!, the difference is that the boxes are books, and the goals are desks. To complete a level, you need to be shoving the books onto the destination desks.
To move a book, you need to be standing behind it so that you can shove it up, down, left or right. But therein lies a few problems, as the books often get trapped in corners, against walls or against other books. You need to be constantly thinking how the books can stay in play. That often means finding wider ‘turning points’ within the level where you can pivot books around or store them while you sort other, more problematic books.
It’s a tale as old as time. We get dozens of these sokoban, crate-pushing games in any release year, and 2026 is no different. Most come from a publisher called Afil Games, who apply a kind of template to the games: 30 levels, 2000G Gamerscore, multiple boxes and multiple goal-squares to make each puzzle difficult. That formula is very much applied to Book It!.
A Keen Eye for a Good Puzzle
What Book It! does have, to its credit, is a keen eye for a puzzle layout. A lot of the layouts are objectively pretty, being flower-like loops or staircases. Book It! is more memorable than a lot of recent sokoban, simply because it’s got this orientation towards layouts that form recognisable shapes and pictures. It’s also why I am confident that I haven’t played the layouts in Book It!. I think I would have remembered them for their shapes alone.
What Book It! does NOT have is something new that disrupts all of the conventional box-pushing. It’s crying out for a little something extra – portals, slidy boxes, turn counters – but it can’t provide them. There must have been something in the library/book premise that could have been spun out to make the game more interesting. Pages left on the floor, for example, which offer additional star rankings if you manage to slide a book over them. Without these extras, we get something that feels a little too much like it has plopped off a factory line.
The degree of challenge is quite high. The opening levels made me wonder if I was getting a more process-oriented sokoban, where the difficulty is rock bottom, but it only took ten levels for that assumption to be proved wrong. This gets fiendish very quickly, and I went scrabbling for an online walkthrough on two occasions. Personally, that’s my preference – I like a sokoban to really push me – but I can’t speak for you.
Yet Another Edition of the Same Book
There isn’t much left to say, which is an indictment by itself. There is 2000G to earn here, and you won’t need to play any more than 15 levels to grab it all. The Undo feature is cracking, as it will take you all the way back to the start of the level, no matter the number of moves, and the Retry system is swift. There’s no Hint system, but I’ve come to terms with that not being a feature in most sokobans.
Book It! could really have done with some gimmick or mechanic to separate it from other sokobans. A book-and-library theme was never going to be enough (although maybe there’s a big librarian demographic that I’m underestimating). What you’re left with is an ultra-conventional sokoban when we already have dozens, if not hundreds, of them on the Xbox. It’s only going to get lost in the crowd.
Which is a shame, as we had a “this is the good shiiii!” punchline ready to go. Maybe we save it for Book It! 2.
Important Links
Shhh… Book It! Has A Library Full Of Puzzling Challenges – https://www.thexboxhub.com/shhh-book-it-has-a-library-full-of-puzzling-challenges/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/book-it/9PF701VXF5QZ
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/book-it-xbox-one/9MZGQRQWCG8X/0010
Buy for PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/book-it-windows/9NNPGF9FNN9X/0010
