A Fine Sokoban-Sliding Puzzle Hybrid that Attempts to be Novel
The sokobear is on something of a downward career trajectory. They started working in a spa in Sokobear Winter, and now they’ve been sent down the mines. I’m slightly worried about where they will end up in the next one.
To be fair, the Sokobear seems to have prospected a valuable mine for themselves. It’s loaded with gems and crystals, which probably nets them a greater wage than in the spa. They spent most of Sokobear Winter being complained at by the punters, so that’s a perk too.
The Sokobear Necessities
It’s all an excuse for a spot of sokoban, as the title implies. Sokobear is pushing clusters of gems around a cave, with the aim of socketing it into a hole where – the press materials tell us – they’re going to sort the gems.
The Sokobear series has always felt distinct from the many, many sokobans that have recently released on the Xbox. Rather than moving the cluster of gems one square at a time, in Sokobear the gems slide from one end of the arena to the other. It makes Sokobear a hybrid. It’s one half sokoban, one half sliding puzzle. The marriage makes sense, as both sliding puzzles and sokoban have similar goals. You’re trying to reach a destination on a top-down grid of squares.
In a sokoban, you’re often trying to avoid situations where your crate or box is lodged in a corner or against the wall, and that doesn’t change here. There’s less of an emphasis on finding space for yourself, though. In a sokoban, you can often get trapped, finding yourself on the wrong side of a line of crates. In Sokobear Cave, that’s less of a factor. There’s almost always room for you. The emphasis shifts to finding a pattern of moves that will eventually end up at the crystal-hole.
If only for variety’s sake, it’s lovely to be doing something different with a sokoban. It ends up feeling slightly more like a sliding puzzle, as it abides by its rules more closely.
Stalagmites are the Bottom-Up Ones, Right?
Credit to Sokobear Cave, it doesn’t stop there. Bringing two genres together might have been considered enough. But it adds some complications. Some of the stalagmites that you shunt against come in different colours, and that means they have a tendency to crumble. Hit them from a large enough distance – velocity is a thing here – and they will topple over, creating a rockpile on the opposite side. That gives you an extra wall to use when sliding your gems around. It might even give you the position you need to reach your goal.
It’s a cracking addition and adds a large number of permutations to an already permutation-heavy puzzle. When do you break the stalagmite? And from which direction? You can topple it in any of the cardinal directions, so that already adds four more factors.
It’s simple and adds layers to the puzzle-solving. If there’s a criticism, it’s that I’m not convinced there should be a minimum distance needed to knock a stalagmite over. You can shove the gem into a coloured stalagmite, hoping it will topple over, only to find that it doesn’t. It feels arbitrary, and I’m trying to wrap my head around why the designers would have bothered adding this rule.
Sokobear Cave doesn’t stop there in terms of adding challenges. It pulls the sokoban trick of adding more gems and more goals. You’re not just shoving one block to another space. You’re shoving two or three. The gems can stop the slide of other gems, so suddenly the permutations go brrrr. What if you position a gem so that it acts as a wall for another gem? There’s a dance happening between the various blocks, and you’re often taking it in turns to move one or the other.
It’s at this point that Sokobear could have exploded into complexity, being almost impossible to solve for a tiny-brained human. But Sokobear Cave doesn’t quite go there. It always feels fair, creating one or two simple problems to solve, and leaving you to work out how they might be overcome. Things do get hard in the latter levels, but not so hard that you feel lost.
RIP to our Brightness Settings
While we’re on the topic of being lost, Sokobear Cave is bizarrely, unfathomably dark. I know that Sokobear Cave takes place in a mine, but I am not convinced that the gameplay had to be seen through such a dark filter. I had to fiddle with my screen settings when playing in anything other than a dark room, as it is genuinely hard to pick out details otherwise. I think it damages the appeal of Sokobear Cave’s presentation, too. It just doesn’t feel as attractive as Sokobear Winter when it’s mired in gloom.
Gloomy, but Competent
Gloominess aside, Sokobear Cave is a very competent puzzler. It hitches its minecart to both sliding puzzles and sokoban, and the result plainly works. The addition of toppling blocks gives the puzzle-designers plenty of ways to make puzzles challenging.
We were feeling sokoban fatigue, thanks to a landslide of them on the Xbox Store, but Sokobear Cave arrives at the party with a sackful of ideas. It’s more than enough to separate Sokobear from the sokocrowds.
Important Links
Sokobear Cave Has A Job For You – And It Involves Gems, Caves, And Puzzles – https://www.thexboxhub.com/sokobear-cave-has-a-job-for-you-and-it-involves-gems-caves-and-puzzles/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sokobear-cave/9PD5KHGL8T19/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/sokobear-cave-xbox-one/9n714k2ps463
There’s one for Windows PC too – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/sokobear-cave-windows/9n9xvcx4qcp6
