A Blink-Or-You-Miss-It Sokoban That Fails To Pack In Any Challenge
Bunny Pit Berry is probably the least sophisticated sokoban game I’ve played. Most crate-pushing games will give you one or two blocks to push about, and then build a fiendish layout around them. You’ll have to intricately maneuver the blocks backwards and forwards through the space, eventually winding up at an answer. They are puzzles that you feel clever for solving.
Bunny Pit Berry wonders what would happen if, instead of one block to move around, you had, perhaps, five or six. It imagines levels where the rooms are absolutely chock-full of blocks. With so many crates in the way, the puzzle layouts don’t have to be all that elaborate. You’re trying to get out of your own way: the most common point of failure is not getting wedged into a corner or wall, it’s when two of your blocks get stuck to each other.
More Isn’t Necessarily Better
It’s akin to a karting game focusing less on high quality tracks, and more on having 100 racers at once. Or a beat ’em up where you get to face ten fighters in a royal rumble. They all sound like noisy, messy fun but the sophistication – the nuance – takes a bit of a battering. And that’s the case with Bunny Pit Berry. I felt like I was trying to make my way through a messy room; I rarely felt like I was cleverly untangling a puzzle.
Bunny Pit Berry starts by chucking you onto a grid with several strawberries and blueberries. The strawberries and blueberries don’t act any differently from each other: you don’t need to push a blueberry into a blueberry punnet, or a strawberry into a strawberry punnet (although, thinking about it, that might have made things more interesting). You nudge them into whichever punnet is more convenient. Once they’re all stored, the level is over and you’re onto the next one.
A large proportion of the levels have you surrounded on all sides by the fruit. The puzzle becomes more about which fruit you concentrate on first – socketing it away so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. There’s some strategy to that, and it’s entirely possible that you’ll be jabbing the Undo and Retry buttons – both well implemented and exactly how you would hope – to push a different one instead.
A Little Too Easy To Swallow
But where Bunny Pit Berry deviates from the sokoban norm is that you can be merrily pushing fruit about, wondering where the ‘puzzle’ bit comes in. On a fair few occasions, I was making room for myself, putting fruit into punnets temporarily so that I could create the maximum space to work in. It’s my go-to method for solving sokoban games. But, suddenly, I found that the level was over. By simply clearing a bit of space, the level was solved.
After a few of these levels, I found myself pining for the other Afil Games sokobans. Shuffling boxes around like a warehouse worker has its own tactile appeal, I suppose, but it’s not making the cogs in my head whirr. I never thought I’d say it, but I missed the frustration and gruelling moments, where a solution seemed out of reach, only for something to click.
Bunny Pit Berry never really evolves to that point. No additional mechanics parachute in to make things more complicated. There’s no fruit with additional rules, or levels with complicated, windy routes. There’s certainly no demand to complete the puzzle in the minimum number of moves, or to slot the right fruit in the right punnet.
If It Were A Fruit It Would Be A Fig, Passing Right Through Us
It made Bunny Pit Berry a bit of a shrug. I was never peeved at Bunny Pit Berry, annoyed at a troublesome mechanic or an overly intricate level. The 2000G Gamerscore flowed readily, and I didn’t need to activate my brain all that much. In a way it acted like a cozy game, massaging the finger muscles as I turned off my brain.
But I wanted to keep my brain turned on. A sokoban without thought is a bit like making room in your fridge. Sure, it’s tactile and there’s some strategy to what you move where, but it’s hardly a Mensa brain challenge, and I think you need a bit of crunch and friction in a sokoban. I finished Bunny Pit Berry a few minutes after I started it, and I was expecting the taste to stick around for longer.
Important Links
Push Some Fruit Around In The Adorable Bunny Pit Berry – https://www.thexboxhub.com/push-some-fruit-around-in-the-adorable-bunny-pit-berry/
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/bunny-pit-berry-xbox-series/9P2FS2ZMSBQL/0010
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/bunny-pit-berry-xbox-one/9N4KVZ9T5K4F/0010
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/bunny-pit-berry-windows/9P3M5DVGXVM6/0010
