A Sokoban Puzzler That’s As Black-And-White As They Come
I don’t remember this in March of the Penguins or Happy Feet. Poko is a penguin (frisbee hat, yellow jacket), and a harsh winter is coming. He needs to keep a stockpile of fish, which means freezing them and piling them on sleds. Only then will he be ready to hibernate till spring.
Zoologists are probably raising a questioning finger or two, but we’re going to assume that Poko’s Arctic Quest’s priority is not realism. This is a £4.19 budget puzzler of the sokoban variety, and its priority is probably more like ‘make puzzlers cry into their cups of tea’. And, to be fair, it achieves that goal very well.
Crate-Pushers Unite!
If you’ve not encountered a sokoban before then congratulations, you’ve avoided one of the most prolific genres in gaming. It means ‘warehouse keeper’ in Japanese, mostly because it involves box-pushing. The aim of a sokoban is to nudge boxes to their destination by pushing them in cardinal directions. The complications come from boxes getting stuck – as soon as they’re in a corner, there’s no means of pushing them out – and you need to find space for your character to maneuver too.
Poko’s Arctic Quest is a straight-down-the-line sokoban. There are no frills to this one – the blocks not being blocks and instead being fish is about the most unusual element. There are pushable fish, unpushable blocks to travel around, and the sleds where the fish need to eventually end up. Nothing gets added to that mix, as sokobans often are wont to do. There are no portals, bridges, keys or levers. It’s as pure as a sokoban can be.
Something that sokobans can get wrong is the supporting features, but Poko’s Arctic Quest gets them right. There is an exhaustive Undo that can unwind every single move you make. There’s also a Retry function that doesn’t require rooting around in menus. It’s only one button-press away. We’d have taken a hint system, but they’re uncommon presumably because they’re so hard to code. It does mean that it’s possible to get stuck and have no recourse, though.
Bugs In The Boxes
One oddness, at least with our runthrough, was that the Level Select didn’t work properly. If we ever quit to the Level Secret screen (lovingly rendered as a Super Mario World-style 2D map), it wouldn’t show the correct progress. It would say that we were one level previous, which was a pain whenever we used the screen. We would have to re-do the previous level to regain our standing.
Yet while Poko’s Arctic Quest is bare-bones, it has a secret weapon. Its puzzles are top-drawer. We’ve played more sokoban games than one person really ever should, and this one’s designs score highly. The layouts are often elegant, with only slight asymmetry, and they might even look benignly easy on first-look. But the problems to solve soon emerge. One sled is nigh impossible to fishify, or one fish feels like it can never be made available. Then it’s onto a solution that can be dozens of moves long.
The praise isn’t consistent for all levels. The difficulty can peak and trough over the thirty puzzles, which feels odd on occasion. We went from puzzles that took us twenty minutes (and multiple Undos) to solve, to a puzzle that needed six or seven jabs from the analogue stick. We’re not quite sure why Poko’s Arctic Quest does this. To give us and Poko a break?
For achievement hunters, we have mostly positive news. Poko’s Arctic Quest will net you 2000G of achievements. You don’t even need to complete all of the levels. The catch is the difficulty: you’re going to need to work for it. The catch to the catch is that there are plentiful guides online.
It-s OK-Oban
As a self-confessed sokoban skeptic, I found myself enjoying Poko’s Arctic Quest. There was something discrete and uncomplicated about it. I could pick it up and complete it in ninety minutes or so, and there wasn’t a single mechanic or obstacle to learn in that time. I was very aware how the lack of nuance made Poko’s Arctic Quest one-dimensional, but it was one-dimensional for a short period of time, and that one-dimension was decently refined.
It would be fair to say that a sokoban puzzle game is only as good as the quality of its puzzles, and on that count Poko achieves his Arctic Quest. These are fiendish layouts made by people who know what they’re doing. We will fully admit that there’s absolutely nothing else to get excited about, but we reckon that simplicity will draw in a decent box-pushing crowd.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/pokos-arctic-quest-xbox-series/9n0wgxsmr798
