A Gorgeous Sokoban That’s Held Back By A Determination To Go 3D
Afil Games may be the most prolific producer of sokoban games on the Xbox, but they rarely step into the 3D space. Their games tend to keep it simple, opting for the same top-down-ish perspective. The downside of this decision is that their games look and play much the same: for my part, it’s hard to mentally distinguish the ones that I have played.
That changes with Mia’s Journey, developed by Ourbit Game Studio, who have mostly dabbled in visual novels and platformers. The Brazilian game studio has delivered a 3D sokoban to the publishing masters of sokoban, and the result made me realise why 3D is so challenging for the genre.
Mamma Mia, Here We Go Again
Moving to 3D certainly doesn’t do any harm to the general production quality. Mia’s Journey is exquisite, looking like a high-end manga. There’s some cracking character design in there: I love the Cat God character, who you can see looming over the sokoban puzzles in the screenshots. He’s somewhere between a Maneki Neko cat and a Totoro, and I would pay good money to have a statuette of the chap. The rest of the game keeps to this level, with lovely watercolour backgrounds and precise character sprites.
The Cat God is there because he is offering Mia, the main character of Mia’s Journey, one of his nine lives. Mia has died and become a cat, which would be heaven for several people I know. But Mia wants to return to life, and that means completing 32 levels for the cat god in return for one of his lives. It’s a tenuous reason for a sokoban, but at least it has a punt. Most sokoban games would chuck a cat in a room with some boxes and say “that’ll do”.
Hopping into the sokoban puzzles, something immediately felt off to me. By moving to a 3D isometric perspective, Ourbit Game Studio hit upon an immediate problem: how do you precisely control the movement of the main character? If a player presses ‘up’, where does it take them? The isometric view means that there is no obvious, incontrovertible ‘up’ in the grid. Everything is at a 45 degree angle.
Hard To Play, By Any Iso-Metric
Ourbit make a decision that I firmly believe is the wrong one. They decide that every control is translated through the perspective of Mia. If you press up to go forwards, then Mia will walk in the direction she is facing. So, if you press ‘up’ and Mia is facing diagonally down, she will move further in that direction. You have to be constantly putting yourself in Mia’s boots.
It takes some getting used to, particularly when you consider that Mia’s Journey is a sokoban, and sokobans need to be precise. A single wrong move and you’ve nudged a block – in this case a blue flame – into a location where it can’t be retrieved. Your punishment for making a wrong call on the directional buttons is failure, and starting the whole level again.
I do wonder if, had this been the only problem, Mia’s Journey might have been OK. I might have learned this unorthodox control scheme before the 32 levels were over. But it compounds the control issues with more problems, and there’s not enough game to come to terms with it all.
There is no Undo button. This is pretty much a table-stake for any sokoban, mainly for the reasons we have mentioned. It’s all too easy to make a single, unwanted mistake, at which point you want to rewind one move rather than, say, thirty. Its absence was a sore point throughout Mia’s Journey. I wanted to throttle the Cat God and take away another of his lives (clearly, I had issues).
Crate-Pushing Has Never Felt So Imprecise
Another problem is inconsistency in the button recognition. I’ll tap in a direction and Mia won’t read it properly. I move left when I meant to move forward. This isn’t pervasive, but it happens frequently enough to make the lack of an Undo even more of a bugbear.
Finally, and the biggest of the bunch, is that Mia’s Journey has some unusual rules for a sokoban. It lets you both pull and push the blue flames. You rock up to the flame, hold the X button to lock onto it, and then either push or pull it. You can’t sidle it sideways, but you do get another option when it comes to maneuvering the flame.
It’s an unusual side-step, and it does differentiate Mia’s Journey from other sokoban. But it also achieves a couple of awkwardnesses. The first is that the puzzles stop being quick and tactile. Locking onto a flame and moving it is a slow and laborious process when most other sokoban are focused on a slick, swift interaction. The second is that the control issues are doubled. You need to be facing the right way, lock on, and then pull the flame in the right direction. Because of the control oddnesses, it means there are more opportunities for accidentally making the wrong input.
A Game With So Much Promise, But It’s Not There Yet
All of the above is enough to sink Mia’s Journey, unfortunately. It’s a shame because there’s some lovely stuff here that isn’t reserved to its gorgeous presentation. The puzzles are really quite well designed, leaning on disappearing platforms (clouds) to make up for the increased capabilities of the player. It would be all too simple to solve your average sokoban puzzle if you could pull AND push a block, so Mia’s Journey limits you by figuratively pulling the rug from beneath you.
There’s a nice level of challenge here. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve positioned a blue flame, thinking that I’ve solved a puzzle, only to realise the flame is sitting on dead air. I can’t push it into the final goal (a cat statue). The level designers deserve no criticism here.
It makes Mia’s Journey something of a ‘what could have been’. It’s beautiful to look at, and the puzzles are some of the best that we’ve played in a sokoban. But when the controls and perspective, plus the lack of an Undo feature, make the experience so painful, there’s nothing Mia’s Journey can do. Very un-cat like, it trips and fumbles, leaving an ungainly sokoban behind.
Important Links
Mia’s Journey Turns A Cat’s Search For Humanity Into A Charming Puzzle Adventure – https://www.thexboxhub.com/mias-journey-turns-a-cats-search-for-humanity-into-a-charming-puzzle-adventure/
Buy the game, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mias-journey-xbox-series/9p9q6wbdpbzm
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mias-journey-xbox-one/9p617dmb9s1z
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mias-journey-windows/9mwcp6vjnz68
