Sneaking And Sokoban Combine For Underwhelming Effect
If you’ve ever sat playing a sokoban, controller in hand, and thought “what this game needs is stealth”, then a) what are you smoking?, and b) believe it or not,someone has actually given it a go.
Sneak Cheese is a sokoban that combines box-pushing with stealth, which – now I think about it – has got a Metal Gear Solid-collab written all over it.
90% of Sneak Cheese is your traditional sokoban. You’re given a top-down grid with the usual goals – in this case flashing pressure pads – and some blocks to push onto them in the form of cheese. You take the role of a magical mouse, and you slip behind the cheese to push it the four cardinal directions. By shunting all of the cheeses onto all of the pressure pads, the level is done and you can move on to 29 more.
Emmental Gear Solid
The usual rules apply. If you move a cheese into a corner, you are doomed. If you push a cheese block next to another cheese block, or against a wall, then there is a very good chance that you are also doomed. At all times, you need to be making use of the space, shuffling cheese round the grid, and coming to a solution that leaves all cheese in all goals.
“What about the stealth?”, you might ask. Well, this comes in the form of cats. They are your nemeses, and they come in two-ish forms. The first are patrol cats. They move on a route, helpfully displayed by pawprints on the grid. Every move you make, every step you take, they move one square too. It’s worth noting that they also take a single move to rotate round, so you have a bit more time than you might anticipate if you’re looking to cross their particular patrol line.
There’s a cute moment later on when you encounter a chonker of a patrol cat. They move one square every two moves, so you can leisurely saunter in front of them and be safe from attack. It’s a small change, but a cute one.
Tickling The Whiskers
The second type of cat is a sleeping, sentinel cat. If you step onto the square directly in front of them, the cat will sniff and wake up, swiping at you and ending the attempt. You need to meander round the back, or more than one square in front. We could be cynical and say that the cat and its ‘sniff-square’ are basically just walls – they’re not quite as inventive as they might seem – but they add an air of menace to proceedings.
As new inclusions go, they’re fairly intuitive and understandable. It takes a little while to learn what’s safe or what isn’t, plus ‘one turn to reverse around’, but otherwise the cats are comprehensible obstacles. Stealth, as it turns out, does fit a sokoban.
Most of the time, though, they didn’t change all that much. The impact they have on the puzzles is that you’re biding your time, rather than hopping straight to a solution. You want to wait for a cat to pass before shunting the cheese across. It adds patience to the sokoban formula. There are also occasions where you want to block the patrol cats. By pushing a block of cheese in front of it, you are reducing its route. But while this is a viable thing to do, there aren’t all that many puzzles that make use of it.
Is Stealth Better Or Gouda?
In my view, patience and biding your time wasn’t something that sokoban really needed. What they could do with is an additional layer of strategy, and more ways to make use of the puzzle space. But this version of stealth doesn’t really do that. You are solving the puzzles in the same ways as before, just with moments where you are pacing back and forth so that a cat is out of the way. I can’t help feeling that the puzzle isn’t enhanced by adding cat patrols, it’s just made more time-consuming.
I’ve got a similar reaction to the sleeping cats. They’re fine, but they’re no different from having a whacking great hole in the middle of the puzzle. You can’t walk into them, and you certainly don’t want to walk in front of them, so they’re effectively written off in puzzle terms. Which, again, isn’t overly strategic. Walls and holes have always been a part of a sokoban.
A Difference In Flavour That’s Too Mild To Work
Which is all an elaborate way of saying that the stealth doesn’t add all that much. It doesn’t detract much either: they add a neat sense of dread, and I guess that finding some space to pace back and forth, and timing your burst, is at least a smidgeon strategic. But when we’re deluged with sokoban games on the Xbox, Sneak Cheese needed to offer something more than ‘sokoban, but slow’.
Sneak Cheese promotes itself as a wacky fusion of sokoban and stealth mechanics, but the stealth stuff is too lightweight to meaningfully change anything. You’re not playing Sneak Cheese any differently than your average sokoban. It’s hard not to see it as anything more than an opportunity missed. There are more thrills to be had from a midnight trip to steal cheese from the fridge.
Important Links
Outsmart The Cats In Sneak Cheese – https://www.thexboxhub.com/outsmart-the-cats-in-sneak-cheese/
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sneak-cheese-xbox-series/9n4br2vljq95
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sneak-cheese-xbox-one/9nrh1s4npwph
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sneak-cheese-windows/9mv78cpn570q
