A Warm Cuddle Of A Sokoban That Won’t Truly Test You
Runes Quest features the most extreme version of ‘accidentally locking yourself out’ that I’ve come across. The knight of Runes Quest takes a tumble off a cliff, when they had been standing next to the front door of – what we presume to be – their castle. But instead of climbing back up, thumbing a ride or anything like that, the knight goes through a back door and navigates 30 puzzles of the crate-pushing, sokoban variety. Personally, I would have called a locksmith and gone through the front door.
It’s not what I expected from the title or game, in all honesty. I expected heroism and swordfighting. Still, I know my way around a sokoban, so why not give it a go?
A Rune With A View
The 30 levels of Runes Quest have a uniform problem for you to solve. The door to the next floor is shut, so you need to activate it and force it open. Instead of keys, this is achieved through the titular ‘runes’. You need to push stone blocks with runes on the top, so that they rest on a magical space which features that same symbol. If you have two runes and two magical spaces, you better ensure that the correct rune is moved to each one.
That happens through some very traditional sokoban. That might not mean anything to you, though, so imagine having a giant box in your front room that can’t be lifted. It’s so big that you can’t pull the thing, so you’re shuffling it forwards. Now, imagine that you accidentally pushed that giant box into a corner: it’s going to be nigh-on impossible to get it out, right? That’s the problem you have to solve with Runes Quest, and almost every other sokoban ever made.
There’s a pleasing, slightly retro feel to Runes Quest’s presentation that I quite like. It makes me stop occasionally and feel like I am playing another genre of game. Stick in a couple of octopi that fire rocks out of their nostrils and it could be an early Legend of Zelda. I’m so used to controlling something adorably cute in my sokoban that a retro-RPG vibe was appreciated.
Rune Escape
If there was something like a challenge-spectrum for sokoban, Runes Quest would be firmly over to the ‘very easy’ side. It only has thirty puzzles, and a large proportion of those are spent ramping up the difficulty or gently tutorialising the mechanics that it introduces. That doesn’t give it much room to mentally torture anyone, so the end result is a sokoban that barely touches the sides. It’s pleasant enough, but I very rarely had to engage my brain. Most of the time, I was completing a series of tasks – get this rune over there, push that rune over here – rather than solving something that neared a puzzle.
When there is strategy, it mostly comes in the form of ‘which key and which lock to use first?. Runes Quest employs keys, and these can unlock your choice of door. Except there are often multiple doors, and if you unlock the wrong one first, it can leave you stranded. You don’t have a key to a subsequent gate, and the Retry button beckons.
There are a few other mechanics, added slowly over the game’s progression, and they sweeten the pot. Crates are added as obstacles, mostly to get in the way of the more consequential runes. You can shuffle them out of the way, but also push them into gaps, creating a causeway, or on top of switches. The switches lower spikes, allowing you to access some other key or rune symbol that eases you to victory.
Rune For Improvement
Runes Quest’s problem here is that none of these are unfamiliar. In sokoban terms, they are fairly widespread, and in wider adventure games they are common as muck. It meant that, once they were introduced, I would nod and acknowledge ‘oh, we’re doing keys and locks now’ rather than ‘ooh, I wonder how this will disrupt matters’. I took them in my stride and got about matters.
The result was as you might expect. I absolutely strolled through the 30 levels here and looked slightly confused when I was confronted by an end credit scene. I believed that I had waltzed through tutorial levels, rather than playing the game proper.
Runes Quest would have benefited from something else to do. There were no collectibles, and no star-rankings for showing off my sokoban-ability. Move counters weren’t present, or rewards for minimum moves. Even some of the mainstays of sokoban weren’t here: I didn’t slide any blocks or hop through any portals. There wasn’t even an Undo button.
Rune-ing Out Of Rune Puns
There is a chance that you won’t want or need these things, and a short, cuddly sokoban is exactly what you’re after. If you tend to tear out your hair at more elaborate sokoban, then Runes Quest will be your chum for thirty minutes. It’s utterly devoid of sharp edges and challenging moments.
While I appreciate that this direction will be appealing to some people, it wasn’t for me. I wanted Runes Quest to be meaner: to toss in some smaller arenas; to be brave enough to let me fail. I like my sokoban to get me jabbing the Undo and Retry buttons at least a few times per level. In Runes Quest, I’m not sure I jabbed them even once.
Important Links
Find Your Way Home In Runes Quest – https://www.thexboxhub.com/find-your-way-home-in-runes-quest/
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/runes-quest/9n9vkf7hrsp2
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/runes-quest-xbox-one/9n113s82tg17
Buy for PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/runes-quest-windows/9phzzv5gvcgj
