A Lot Of Sokoban With A Little Sliding-Puzzle
With a name like Sokobear, there was only one direction his life was heading in. And that direction was up, left, push a block, round and push the block again.
I ended up feeling a lot of sympathy for Sokobear. He works in a winter spa, and no one will give him a break. Sokobear Winter constantly cuts away to people hassling him about how everything’s broken, yet he’s never the one who’s broken it (the culprit gets outed in a late cutscene, the scoundrel). He’s just the one who’s left to pick up the pieces. And by pick up the pieces, we mean push logs around a grid.
Slide To The Left, Slide To The Right…
Although his name is Sokobear, and each spa looks like a sokoban-style puzzle, this isn’t actually your typical sokoban. A typical sokoban would have you pushing a block one step at a time, nudging it round corners and carefully avoiding corners and sides. Sokobear Winter leans into its icy themes – the spa has frosted over, you see – and incorporates sliding puzzles. You aren’t pushing the log one square at a time, you are pushing it once and watching it slide until it hits an obstacle.
It’s a novel take on a sokoban. We’re sure it must have been done before, but we just haven’t encountered one. Kudos regardless: the hybrid of sliding puzzles and sokoban works well. They’re entirely complimentary.
Each puzzle requires Sokobear to slide a log into some kind of whirlpool or plug, which heats up the pool. We don’t have a huge amount of outdoor spa experience, but that seems unlikely. How does submerging a log make it hotter? Regardless, this is the goal for every level. One log into one hole, until midway through the game and it’s two logs into two holes. For the last ten levels, it’s three logs into three holes.
Bearly A Challenge
For the first half of Sokobear Winter, I felt an odd pang of guilt. The puzzles seemed exceptionally easy, and I could ignore large swathes of the arena. Was I right to visit all those blocks in the top-left? In a few moves the puzzle would be done, and I’d think back to the many different ways I could have solved it. There’s no singular, elegant solution to each puzzle.
In other sokoban puzzles like Cute Bonfire and The Cute Whale, the puzzles are cleverly wrought so that only solution is possible. Each move has to be carefully considered otherwise you’re reaching for the Reset and Undo buttons. I’ll admit to preferring that brand of sokoban. They feel like knotty riddles to solve, while the first half of Sokobear Winter is more of a toy to tinker with. There are numerous ways to solve it, so it’s more about enjoying the process.
That starts to change with the second half of Sokobear Winter. It gets more confident and willing to scupper the player. It also coincides with the arrival of two logs and two whirlpools. Suddenly, there is a moveable log that could be used as an obstacle for your other sliding log. The dam breaks and suddenly challenge washes over Sokobear Winter.
I got a little kick out of calibrating to how Sokobear Winter thinks. The first step is to work out where the puzzle is. It might be shockingly easy to get one log into one whirlpool. But it’s the second whirlpool that’s the problem. With one log off the board, there might be no way to stick a log in the second hole. Now you have the basis of the problem, and the solution is often one of two things: either you need to swap logs, moving the obvious one into the least obvious whirlpool; or you need to retain both logs, using them as movable walls.
It’s neatly done, and while the puzzles aren’t quite as elegant as other budget sokoban – check a screenshot and they’re often large, sprawling arenas – they’re still clever and with unique problems to solve. We could spend anything from ten moves to two-hundred completing a puzzle.
Puzzles On A Postage Stamp
Where Sokobear Winter slightly falters is in its presentation. I’m not a fan of how the grid takes up so little of the game screen. You have a huge boundary of ice around the puzzle, which not only creates ugly, dead space, but means the arena (and everything in it) is finicky and small. We wanted to do the whole Blade Runner ‘stop-and-enhance’ thing to bring everything full-screen.
And, perhaps as a casualty of this zoomed-out approach, I often felt feelings of inaccuracy. I wasn’t 100% confident whether a log would stop at an obstacle or bypass it. There are no grid lines, the sprites are tiny, and the rocks and ice blocks are small within their squares. It puts a little bit of doubt in my mind: when I slide this block, is it going to go where I think it will? This is particularly true of the early game, when I was still learning Sokobear Winter.
It’s not debilitating, but it made Sokobear Winter feel a little rough around the edges. And that’s a problem when there are so, so many sokoban games out there. Barely a month goes by without a new one on the Store.
A Promising Hybrid Held Back
Sokobear Winter needed something to make it stand out, and the sliding logs is an emphatic attempt. The splicing of sokoban and ice-sliding puzzles works an absolute treat: they go together like bears and honey.
What drags Sokobear Winter back, though, is a tiny game screen that has knock-on effects to feelings of control. That and a lack of challenge means that Sokobear Winter doesn’t quite stand out as much as it could have done. Sokobear Winter is middle-of-the-pack, when it had so much more promise.
Important Links
Adjust the Temperature and Relax with Sokobear Winter – https://www.thexboxhub.com/adjust-the-temperature-and-relax-with-sokobear-winter/
Buy Sokobear Winter from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/sokobear-winter/9NK5DGXPBNFW
Take home an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/sokobear-winter-xbox-one/9p9mjxmsh3jx
