Another Crack At Experimenting With Sokobans, To Mixed Results
Afil Games’ latest sokoban game, Mole Mine Boom, has a complete disregard for safety. Instead of pushing blocks around a grid, you’re pushing TNT. That TNT isn’t neatly packed away into a box: it stands proud, wick out. And you’re not pushing it around delicately, either: you are merrily sliding it from one end of an arena to another, like it’s a bowling ball.
But this is a budget sokoban puzzle game, so we can probably give Mole Mine Boom a pass. It does, after all, assume that a mole would need minecarts, hard-hats and TNT, when we’re pretty sure that they’re well-equipped for digging underground.
Ah Yes, The World Definitely Needed Another Sokoban
If you’re new to sokoban games, then a small introduction is needed. A sokoban game is a game where you need to push blocks around an arena so that they eventually end up on a goal-square. You can shunt the blocks around by stepping behind it and heaving it in a cardinal direction. It moves one block, hopefully closer to its destination.
Afil Games have not stopped there. With Mole Mine Boom they burrow deeper than that. It’s very much in keeping with the publisher’s current impetus to produce sokoban games that are gently different from each other, exploring mechanics and riffs on the formula.
In Mole Mine Boom, there are two types of block to shunt about. Minecarts are very much the traditional sokoban crate. They move one square at a time. The other variety of block is the TNT, and this rolls from one side of the arena to the other when pushed, as if they were in a sliding puzzle. Mole Mine Boom brings two blocks with two different rules into one space.
Don’t Mix Up Your Carts And Bombs
The two blocks have different purposes, too. The TNT is there to remove blockages, as you might expect. Cave-ins block you from minecarts or the goal, and you can roll the TNT into them and kick back as they explode. The minecarts are your win-condition, however. You need to be pushing these into the hatch-like machine that represents the goal.
It’s a neat crossing of the streams. Blockages will deny you important parts of the level. You might not be able to reach everything you need, which means a TNT is your weapon of choice. Once the cave-in has been cleared, you can move onto the next part of the level. It’s a tidy staggering system.
But the TNT is also critically limited. If you roll a TNT into a wall or corner, there is a very good chance it’s going to get stuck there, so you need to maneuver it into positions where it doesn’t get stuck. And this is where the minecarts come in. By pushing your minecarts, you can create temporary walls for the TNT rollers. The TNT can be pushed against the side of the cart, and then onto the rocks that you need obliterating. The two blocks can be used symbiotically, gradually nudging you towards a goal.
Patiently Waiting For The Puzzles To Turn Up
It’s a clever idea that gets undone a little in practice. Particularly in the first 15 or so levels, the levels are less like puzzles and more a laboured process where you are slowly pushing minecarts so that they can become walls for the TNT. Almost every one of these levels can be solved, not by cleverly shunting your TNT about, but by incrementally moving the TNT and carts in tandem. It’s slow, and it doesn’t feel particularly clever.
Mole Mine Boom seems to acknowledge this in the second half, where the puzzles aren’t solved by a back and forth between cart and TNT, and are instead solved by working out which TNT to sacrifice to which cave-in, and at what time. This is where Mole Mine Boom shines: when the cave-ins are just as relevant to the puzzle as the other elements.
But so much damage is already done. I can imagine people checking out of Mole Mine Boom in the first half, not least because that half also contains the game’s achievements. You can reach 2000G in this slightly soggier, more unsatisfying half of the game, and I suspect people will pull the escape-rope before Mole Mine Boom’s gets good.
We’re All For Reinventing The Sokoban Genre
Stick around, though, and Mole Mine Boom can be a competent little sokoban. The difficulty takes a while to appear, but when it does it can be granite-hard. The puzzle layouts are clever, and often modular, segmenting the puzzle into areas blocked by cave-ins. And we’re always warm to a sokoban that doesn’t take the usual, well-worn tracks. Afil Games have been experimenting recently and it’s appreciated. Mole Mine Boom may not be quite as successful as some of their other sokoban-hybrids, but it’s the product of a worthwhile philosophy.
Stand Mole Mine Boom next to some of the other sokobans released recently – Puzzledorf in particular, plus some of Afil Games’ other titles – and it doesn’t stack up particularly well. Its first half advertises the rest of the game poorly, and you’re stuck with 15 levels that lack challenge and are more of a chore. But it still has merit thanks to a decent second half, and a determination to shift up the usual sokoban rules.
In sokoban terms, Mole Mine Boom is less an explosion and more of a half-hearted bang, but it might do enough to justify blowing a half-hour hole in your gaming backlog.
Important Links
Mole Mine Boom Wants You To Blow Up Its Puzzles – https://www.thexboxhub.com/mole-mine-boom-wants-you-to-blow-up-its-puzzles/
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mole-mine-boom-xbox-series/9n0rg5mvxpgv
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mole-mine-boom-xbox-one/9nm29jgr9d9h
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mole-mine-boom-windows/9phqf4x935v0
