Not a Sokoban but a Rather Inventive Floor-is-Lava Puzzle Game
Afil Games, possibly the most prolific publisher on Xbox, has a habit of doing sokoban fake-outs. They release so many sokoban, crate-pushing puzzles that I have a habit of assuming that any top-down grid-based game from them will be a sokoban. But, every twenty games or so, they pull a fast one. Which is where Sands and Relics comes in: a game that looks like a sokoban box-shover, but is in fact something else entirely.
There are no boxes to push in Sands and Relics. The only thing you move, in fact, is the main character: a Lara Croft knockoff who gets immediate cool points for finishing each level with a doughnut on her Harley Davidson. She has cool steampunk goggles and a taste for treasure.
Tomb Raider: Overworld
Instead of shimmying across ledges or swan-diving into T-Rexes, the main character specialises in grabbing treasure from locations that are falling apart. Wherever she steps, the square behind her disintegrates, leaving her in a perilous position. She has to keep moving to get to the treasure chest at the end of the level.
But there’s another rule, which makes matters significantly more difficult. Not-Lara Croft must step on every single square of the treasure room, presumably because that last act triggers a pressure pad that opens the chest. Your last step better be the chest, otherwise you’re getting some amateur acupuncture from the spikes below.
It’s an easy-to-understand objective that I’m surprised hasn’t come up more often. It’s really quite elegant. We would often stay stock still and mentally create a path through the level. In early levels, that might be a Snake-like zigzag through the grid, ensuring that there are no dead-ends that will be impossible to clear by the end of the puzzle. Sands and Relics is about leaving your options constantly open.
Getting Sand in the Most Unfortunate of Places
After ten or so levels, you might find a formula for completing a Sands and Relics level. But Afil Games are one step ahead of you. They introduce harder squares of sand – ones which need TWO steps to clear – and, towards the end of the game, portals get added too. The portals in particular confound us: since you emerge from the opposite side of a portal to the one you entered, you have to be very careful how you approach them.
I love that Sands and Relics didn’t keep things one-note, as it completely disrupted my methodology for completing a level. Take harder sand, for example: I had been taught NOT to create any dead-ends with my paths, but harder sand allows you to walk into a dead-end and then step back out. I love it when puzzle games break their golden rules, and Sands and Relics does precisely that to great effect.
Does Sands and Relics let itself down? Only a little. For a game where you can absolutely blast through levels – especially at the start of the game – there are precious few of them. There are thirty levels, and portals only appear for the final ten of them. Which is annoyingly late, as they bring so much challenge. As soon as we began to untangle them, ‘thinking with portals’ as they say, Sands and Relics was over.
This isn’t a value-criticism, as Sands and Relics is less than a fiver. It’s more of a criticism of the degree of challenge. Sands and Relics feels reluctant to expose a player to the more demanding mechanics, so saves them until it’s too late. I’d say that I got stuck on about two levels in this collection, and I would love to say that I got stuck on more. Too many levels felt a little self-evident, leaving Sands and Relics a little lacking in difficulty.
Kicking you While You’re Impaled
I have a special hatred for a death cutscene, too. It’s such a small thing, but it needs to be mentioned. When you die in Sands and Relics, there’s about a fifty-percent chance that you will get the same animated sequence of the main character falling to her doom. It’s skippable, so that’s something, but when you die so often in Sands and Relics – often multiple times in a few seconds – it can cause a little gasp of irritation. YES YES I know, I am rubbish. You don’t have to play a low-budget Wile E Coyote cartoon to prove it.
I stepped away from Sands and Relics feeling mostly positive. I can’t tell you how good it felt to sidestep the prospect of yet another sokoban and get something different and more interesting instead. It’s a brand of puzzle that I haven’t come across too often, and unravelling how to be good at that kind of puzzle took some time.
And just when I did get good, the hard-sand and portals appeared. I like this side of Afil Games: being discontent with simply coming up with a puzzle template and churning out thirty levels. They’ve disrupted the puzzle with some fantastic additions, and you have to rewrite your strategies.
A Little Treasure
I just wish Sands and Relics was a bit bigger and bolder. The puzzles refuse to sprawl, and there’s only a couple that truly vex. Portals come in too late. I felt like Sands and Relics was a toe in the water, a test of whether this kind of puzzle would be accepted by the baying puzzle hordes. I think it will, but it will need a Sands and Relics 2 to really push the format to its limits.
While we wait for that sequel, if you’re a puzzle fan who fancies something different, and wouldn’t say no to 2000G for thirty minutes of game, then Sands and Relics might be your treasure of choice.
Important Links
Don’t Trust The Ground Beneath Your Feet In Sands and Relics – https://www.thexboxhub.com/dont-trust-the-ground-beneath-your-feet-in-sands-and-relics/
Buy, Optimised for Xbox Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/sands-and-relics-xbox-series/9MTRH2H75ZS4/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/sands-and-relics-xbox-one/9nl1tptm5r1t
There’s a Windows PC drop too – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/sands-and-relics-windows/9p6qnc2q3v9v
