The Sokoban Game To Rule Them All
There’s a very good chance that, with Puzzledorf, you will never need another sokoban game. It adopts the ‘more is more’ approach, and delivers about six games’ worth of crate-pushing, densely packed into one solid brick of sokoban.
I wasn’t aware of what I was getting myself into. I was too busy squee-ing over the Amiga-like artwork, which managed to evoke a very specific time-period (1992) and a very specific publisher (Virgin Interactive). Puzzledorf made me want to hop from the main island where the puzzles were played, and instead join a session of Mega-lo-Mania or Cannon Fodder on the fringes of the game world. The main character even looked a little like Soccer Kid. I got a big old kick out of it.
Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Sokoban?
But while I was being extremely middle-aged and enjoying the 2D sprite artwork, I was getting tricked into opening a Trojan Horse of sokoban. Because there are a ridiculous number of puzzles within Puzzledorf. Fenced into categories called ‘Beginner’, ‘Classic’, ‘Christmas’ and ‘Ruins’, there are 120 puzzles to play. 240 if you count the mirror-versions of each category. Stack Puzzledorf against the average indie sokoban, which tends to have 30 puzzles to solve, and Puzzledorf, well, dwarfs it.
The ‘Beginner’ game mode does a good job of onboarding you into what a sokoban game is, and how to solve them. You have your little Soccer Kid, and they can get behind blocks that are in the level, to shunt them around the grid. Each coloured block needs to slot into their corresponding coloured goal. Once that happens, the level is over and you can move onto the next one.
‘Beginner’ didn’t cause us to sweat much, but that’s kind of the point. You don’t get more than a couple of blocks and a couple of goals, while there are also some ‘null’ blocks that can also be moved, but they don’t have anywhere that they need to go. Most of the time, they get in the way. We completed Beginner in half-an-hour or so, and wondered whether the rest of the 210 puzzles were going to be like this.
Difficulty To Match All Ability Levels
Ha! Clearly not. ‘Classic’ continues the traditional rules of sokoban, but turns the dial on the difficulty almost immediately. It’s like being immediately parachuted into the last levels of an indie sokoban. I was beaten up by ‘Classic’, moving the annoying null blocks out of the way so that I could cycle through the level and tuck blue blocks onto blue goals and so on.
But something else happens in ‘Christmas’ and ‘Ruins’. In ‘Christmas’, the mechanics get a tweak so that sliding puzzles can feature. Nudge a block and it slides from one end of the puzzle to the other. This brings Puzzledorf in line with some other slide-based sokoban like Sokobear and Slide Vikings. It’s not revolutionary, then, but it’s pretty sweet to get two kinds of sokoban games rolled in for the price of one.
Finally, ‘Ruins’ does something that I’ve not seen before, and it’s ace. It builds on the sliding-puzzle-meets-sokoban of the ‘Christmas’ category, but introduces – of all things – some match-3 puzzling. You need to align three blocks of a single colour, at which point they disappear and the level is complete. You can’t align them in an L-shape: they have to be in an unbroken straight line. Then ‘Ruins’ gives you multiple blocks of different colours. Which three are you going to align first? When the blocks disappear, does that give you a greater number of opportunities, or fewer?
I Soko-Can’t Do It Anymore
I’m probably into double-figures for the number of sokoban I have played this year, so I’m particularly warm to a bit of innovation in the genre. ‘Ruins’ is so, so welcome, adding new strategies to a somewhat stale puzzle type. I love it when ‘Ruins’ forces you to think very carefully about which colours you clear first, as often you need them to stick around. Since ‘Ruins’ is a sliding puzzle at heart, you will often need blocks to remain so that you can use them as walls for further sliding.
Puzzledorf doesn’t only nail a sheer volume of content (plus a bit of innovation in the space): it gets the supporting features right too. There are exhaustive Undo and Reset features, both triggering instantaneously. A move-counter ticks up, allowing you to show-off the minimal number of moves it took you to complete a level. And – best of all – there are achievements for finishing certain levels in a tiny number of moves. There are few better feelings than hearing a diamond-achievement pop after clearing a level.
Could there have been more? Eh, perhaps. The mirror mode, which flips each puzzle on the Y-axis, is hardly worth bothering with. Highscores for the move-counter, or – better – a ‘best possible score’ for each level, would have added another layer and made us replay levels. But, generally, as a package this is fit-to-bursting. It almost feels churlish to want more stuff.
The Blueprint For All Sokoban From Now On
If there are quibbles, it’s with the nature of sokobans rather than Puzzledorf itself. I found my fatigue levels rising as I played through the improbable number of levels here, and that’s not because the levels weren’t varied enough. I’m just firmly of the belief that sokoban are inherently limited, and you can’t play them for much longer than half an hour at a time. You’re largely doing the same actions and thinking in the same terms – how to make room for yourself while not getting anything stuck – to the degree that things get repetitive.
I struggle to think of a better sokoban package than Puzzledorf. It’s a skyscraper of stuff, populated with more puzzles than you could possibly need and some delicate mechanic-shifts to keep things interesting. The Millennial-bating graphics are a cherry on top. I love how authentically retro Puzzledorf feels.
The only thing holding back Puzzledorf is that it’s a sokoban. It’s not the most more-ish of puzzle genres, and I found my attention wandering after an hour or two. But as an example of the genre, it’s peerless.
Important Links
Get Your Brain Working With Puzzledorf – https://www.thexboxhub.com/get-your-brain-working-with-puzzledorf/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/puzzledorf/9n7rdj33k5gt
