Indietail – Sokobos

I haven’t written any reviews as of late due to my university schedule and the lack of time, frankly… but whenever I came home, exhausted and drained, there was one game that kind of helped me chill… until I got frustrated and ended up quitting. Sokobos is a somewhat minimalistic and modern approach to the Sokoban formula – and I mean “modern” as in “innovative” and not as in “modern” if that makes sense… the game’s set in Ancient Greece, after all!

Developer: Daisy Games
Publisher: Daisy Games
Genre: Sokoban, Minimalistic, Indie, 2D, Puzzle, Pixel Art
Release Date: April 1st, 2022
Reviewed on: PC
Available on: PC
Copy was provided by the developer.

But what is a Sokoban game, you may ask,… and well, it’s one of those “push” puzzles where you have to try and push objects onto certain fields or in a specific manner to travel through the levels and reach some sort of goal. They’re quite simple in nature but the complexity of Sokobos was incredibly surprising to me as it adds a lot of different enhancements to the formula and gives it a fresh spin with elements such as “painting” blocks and creating statues, which I at least haven’t seen before personally!

YoU’re tasked with building a garden for the Gods, meaning that it has to be perfect. Hence, everything is laid out and planned beforehand. You just have to move the different parts to their places and create the most beautiful garden ever created! To do so, you push blocks and try to nudge them in the right direction. What’s important, however, is that you cannot pull blocks, meaning that you’re screwed if your different parts end up in a corner or in a spot they don’t belong in with no way to reclaim them… Now, technically, you’re “screwed” but Sokobos allows you to undo moves as many times as you want. You can restart the game, disable and enable the move counter, you don’t even have to compete for the leaderboards or complete all of the 60 or so levels… If something gets too challenging just skip the level and return to it later. It’s pretty forgiving.

And I believe that this nature of the game is probably the best thing about Sokobos. It’s made by a solo dev that loves the genre and that wants others to enjoy the game. It’s short, it’s witty, and has some pretty complex solutions to it… You can min-max the steps it takes to complete a level and try to get on those leaderboards but more than anything, this game is challenging and I love it. If I don’t enjoy something, I can skip it or come back to it later.

The presentation overall is alright. It doesn’t get stale, in my opinion. The little story fragments and snippets are pretty interesting, though not too outstanding. For the price, there’s certainly a lot to enjoy here in Sokobos and I’d recommend it to anyone that is looking for some light to heavy puzzling!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!