A Sokoban Twist That Struggles To Provide A Challenge
Don’t be fooled by the screenshots. Toad Slide may look like your common-or-garden sokoban game, but it’s actually something different. It’s not so much about box-pushing as it is about box-licking.
Toads, you see, are blessed more in the tongue department than the arm department. Taking that inspiration, Toad Slide asks what would happen to a traditional sokoban game if the boxes were licked, ingested and then spat out in a different direction. Would it make for an interesting puzzle game?
Don’t Talk With A Box In Your Mouth
Imagine you’re the toad from Toad Slide, and you are facing a crate. A tap of the A button sends your tongue whipping towards it, and now the crate’s in your mouth. The toad is ‘bloated’ and cannot move. Fair play, the toad does look like I do after a Christmas roast. All it can do is spit the box out in a cardinal direction.
It’s here that there’s a sliver of inspiration from sliding games. The box doesn’t just pop out, it hurtles out at speed. It keeps travelling until it hits a wall, then stops, ready to be licked again. This is the toolkit of Toad Slide, and it’s all you will need to solve the thirty puzzles on offer.
The crates don’t just go anywhere. As in Afil Games’ other sokoban games, the crates need to go on specific spots. These light up with glowing insignia, and the crates can be dropped on and off these spots as needed. Often, puzzles have multiple crates and multiple hotspots.
It takes some getting used to. I kept sidling up to boxes and dry-humping them, expecting them to move. And the length of the tongue is a little arbitrary: you can lick boxes from two spaces away. The first levels adjust the muscle memory to accept these new rules.
We Had Toad Slide Licked
A thought popped into my head, and it never really went away. How do you make a puzzle out of this moveset? It’s not as if the boxes can get trapped like they can in sokoban; the toad can just amble over to a cornered crate and gobble it up. As a result, the opening levels felt more like sorting stuff – like we had a day shift in a warehouse – than untangling a puzzle knot.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s some pleasure to be had in following a process. While these opening levels were benign, there was a cozy enjoyment from hoovering up boxes and then vomiting them elsewhere. Sure, it failed to get the brain firing, but it was still engaging.
As the levels progressed, though, the difficulty failed to ramp. Things got harder but never hard. It’s our ringing criticism of Toad Slide: while it explores whether a Frogoban can work (we’re patenting the term – hands off), the test ultimately shows that no, it doesn’t – not wholly. The toad is too powerful. It can get out of almost every scrape or dead-end. That leaves plenty of room for error, and hundreds of different ways to solve each puzzle. There needed to be more toad pushback for it to generate any challenge.
There were only two levels in the thirty on offer that gave us pause. One was a crossroads where, wherever we spat out the box, it would get stuck in a dead-end. But once we realised that a box had to be left as a doorstop (or boxstop) then the puzzle was solved. Another had an offshoot that meant two boxes had to be cycled round in a figure-eight to get to the destination. But while we were outfoxed for a moment, it was only a moment. The same shape and solutions were even reused in four different puzzles. We didn’t need to prove our ability that many times.
An Odd Hybrid, With Warts And All
I’m not sure there’s a future for the Frogoban. It needs limitations on the frog, but those limits might over-complicate things or – worst of all – make it less enjoyable. It will be fascinating to see if Afil Games pursue it with future games, or chalk it up as a failed experiment.
Not that Toad Slide is something to avoid. It may have warts, but it’s still a curiosity. I found it intriguing as a proof of concept, and there was a scholarly interest in exploring its potential. And while it has faults, those faults never create pain for the player. If anything, it makes Toad Slide a breeze: fifteen minutes of quickfire puzzling and 2000G at the end. That’s a whole lot of Gamerscore to stick in your gullet. Some may even see the lack of challenge as a positive.
I’m happy that Toad Slide exists. While the mix of sokoban and sliding games doesn’t gel (too easy, no strategy), the experiment was enjoyable to take part in. Plus we were rewarded 2000G for our curiosity. Not a bad deal all round.
Important Links
Ready to Master the Mystic Tongue in Toad Slide? – https://www.thexboxhub.com/ready-to-master-the-mystic-tongue-in-toad-slide/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Xbox Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/toad-slide-xbox-series/9NVR9QN819M0/0010
Enjoy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/toad-slide-xbox-one/9P5VXJ1QJK8X/0010
Or take the PC edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/toad-slide-windows/9NCF1T6CWW2S/0010
