A Cute Little Sokoban, but one Without a Single Idea to Offer
Hands (or paws) down, my favourite part of Milo Paws and Buoys is when you push a buoy onto one of the drowning cats. They don’t hang onto it for dear life: they hop on top instead, put on some sunglasses, and slurp from a cocktail. I’d like to think it’s how I would behave if a lifeguard ever stopped me from drowning.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much else that is remarkable about Milo Paws and Buoys. This is a straight-down-the-line sokoban, familiar to anyone who has splashed a fiver on a similar game on the Xbox Store. I was a little surprised to check the credits and see that it wasn’t from Afil Games, the masters of crate-pushing games on the Xbox. It certainly plays and presents like one of their games.
Milo on the Lilo
Milo Paws is a cat lifeguard, working shifts at a beach and – halfway through the game – graduating to a house pool. As is the way with cats, they’re not the best swimmers, and Milo Paws finds himself called into action. Cats have fallen off their buoys (or life-rings, if you prefer), and it’s your job to nudge the rings back to the cats so they can return to their cocktails.
The nudging is your typical sokoban stuff. You can push the buoys in any cardinal direction, but you’ve got to be careful to not get them stuck. Corners in particular need to be avoided as you can’t get behind the buoy to retrieve it, while walls aren’t much better. As I like to think about it, you’re trying to keep the puzzle ‘alive’ at all times, ensuring that your maneuvers don’t cause a buoy to get irretrievably lost.
The designers take advantage of these perils to create compact, claustrophobic puzzles. They might even look solvable from the outset, until you start mucking around and pushing buoys. Only then do you realise that you don’t have enough room, the other buoys are getting in the way, or you’re on the wrong side of the buoy to push it in the direction you want.
The Pun in the Title is One of the Most Inventive Things About it
Milo Paws and Buoys gets the puzzle design stuff right. There’s nothing special about the layouts, but they work. Even better, they sit in that sweet spot of being devious but not so much that you want to give up. Something unique to sokoban puzzles is that you can sense that you’re making progress, even if it doesn’t look like it. Through loops of the grid, you can slowly work yourself into a winning position. It’s the same here.
Milo Paws and Buoys also gets the Undo and Reset features right. You can reverse every decision, all the way back to the very first move, which is exactly how it should be. A tap of the reset button brings you to the start of the puzzle in seconds – again, as it should be. There is no hint or skip feature, which would have been nice, but we’re yet to see either in a sokoban, which makes us think that they may be harder to implement than we think.
What Milo Paws and Buoys doesn’t have is any additional mechanics or design wrinkles to make it stand out. The number of buoys and cats does get larger, but that’s something of a table-stake with a sokoban nowadays. You can push cats off their buoys (hilarious when you think that you’re a lifeguard), but – again – that’s expected.
The Perfect Average of all Sokoban Games
Which means that I’m scrabbling about, looking for something interesting to say. Or offer a meaningful reason to play Milo Paws and Buoys over the hundreds of sokobans that already exist. When the best I can offer is ‘the presentation is quite nice’, ‘the soundtrack is a bop’ and ‘it’s hilarious the first few times that you push a cat onto a buoy’ you know that you’re grasping at straws.
Milo Paws and Buoys doesn’t do anything wrong, necessarily. It’s a smooth-swimming sokoban, with nothing that will frustrate fans of the genre. But it doesn’t offer a single idea or moment of interest.
I feel completely untouched by Milo Paws and Buoys, having finished it. I won’t be able to tell you anything about it in a year, month or even a week’s time. I couldn’t draw you one of its puzzles, or recall a moment of note. It occupied me for an evening, and was swiftly deleted from the hard drive.
Now, you will have to excuse me: I need to get back to lounging in the pool with my sunglasses and cocktail.
Important Links
Milo Paws and Buoys – A Lifeguard Cat Takes On Summer Puzzle Duty – https://www.thexboxhub.com/milo-paws-and-buoys-a-lifeguard-cat-takes-on-summer-puzzle-duty/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/milo-paws-and-buoys/9pn2r0xgxs0h
There’s an Xbox One edition – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/milo-paws-buoys-xbox-one/9n6hvjkd3zc4
And a Windows PC version – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/milo-paws-buoys-windows/9npxdk7f3v0r
