The Gods themselves have tasked you with building a mighty temple in their honour in Sokobos by Daisy Games! You have been granted great strength but must complete this alone and forego any relations until the command is complete! As a premise for a puzzle game it’s a bit grandiose, but what the heck! I’m in!
We start simple, having a four piece statue we must assemble but the difficulty soon ramps up introducing blocks that can’t be moved when assembled, blocks that must go on other blocks, black blocks that must be coloured first etc. I soon found myself staring at the screen, planning out complex routes, doing mental gymnastics and thinking five steps ahead like chess masters of old to find optimum routes for my little guy. Most of the time, only to have my plans dashed by that one block that gets stuck in an irretrievable position!
Immediately upon booting the game I was thrown back to the 1980’s dos era with graphics similar to Ultima 1. We are then shown a brief cutscene of our character Aeschylus saying goodbye to his family to fulfill the Gods wishes.
Based off the Sokoban game of block pushing, we are in a birds eye view and only have the cardinal directions as movement. Moving against a block will push it in that direction provided nothing is preventing it. We also have an undo button which can be used multiple times and a complete reset button. Though I did mix these buttons up a few times, my mental capacity taken up with plotting courses. Thankfully, there is also a skip level function if you do find yourself completely stumped.
Brief snippets will pop up before each level either as a tutorial for a new block type or Aeschylus’ inner thoughts, drip feeding us a narrative. At the end of each level we are told the amount of steps we took and if you are online it will be uploaded to a leaderboard wherein you can look in awe at everyone’s highscores and go ‘How they do that?’
Although simple looking Sokobos does contain a real challenge and you will be there expanding your mind with that ‘one more go’ and ‘what if I tried this’ style gameplay and enjoy when a block satisfyingly slides into place. When it clicks, it clicks!
Developer: Daisy games
Publisher: Daisy games
Platform: Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOs
