Ligo
Difficulty : 4/5 (Very Hard)
Global : 5/5 (Perfect)
Look no further. If you like sokoban games, Ligo will probably be the best of this year.
Ligo takes you to a mysterious galaxy plagued by yellow squids. You control one of the creatures tasked to cure every land of this galaxy; the squids need to be crushed.
Ligo is a purely 2D sokoban in a side view, which is actually pretty rare! Sokoban games are usually false 2D, a top-down view but they actually have a lot of verticality in them. Purely 2D sokoban games tend to sacrifice the y-axis and don’t play with height. Puzzle games that choose to sacrifice the z-axis are usually puzzle-platformers, which is why Ligo is original. It’s NOT a platformer, the only similar game I can think of is Snakebird.
The first world of Ligo is perhaps the best tutorial I’ve ever seen in a puzzle game. A few puzzles in and you already know this game is gonna be incredible, everything is just perfectly crafted.
The very first thing that impressed me was not even related to the puzzles, it’s the music. Every track of this game is fantastic, these calm and melancholic tunes complement the feeling of the game extremely well. Props to the composer, really!
The puzzles of this first world teach you the basic tricky interactions you’ll have to deal with, it’s literally a shower of “aha moments” that instantly makes you understand the puzzle design is excellent.
So, what exactly are the mechanics of this game?
Like every sokoban, the cube is your best friend. However this time you also have other best friends, namely other creatures like you. Dealing with several creatures at once is one of the strong focuses of the game.
Don’t worry if you hate simultaneous control, there are plenty of puzzles with only one creature! The creatures can fuse when they come into contact in a specific position, resulting in a longer or taller creature.
Another major aspect of Ligo is weight, it’s not a game that just plays with height, oh no! Cubes are heavy, you can use them to crush squids, no problem. A creature is lighter than a squid though, which means you can’t just fall on a squid to crush it… unless you’re in fused form. Two fused creatures are heavier than a squid, but still lighter than a cube. You actually need 3 fused creatures for a cube to be lighter.
The latter info might seem irrelevant, but this is an extremely important aspect later in the game as you’ll get to the most complex mechanic : gravity beams. I won’t go into detail about it… but yeah, you can imagine how tricky weight management can get with it.
It’s really hard to describe Ligo’s mechanics in detail given how rich the game is. It just fully explores everything, every puzzle feels different and explores a subtlety of the mechanics; this is the mark of the great puzzle games. The puzzles are small, you can end up brute forcing some of them, but overall the interactions and setups are just too tricky and precise for that. Which means the difficulty is very high, Ligo is a long game that requires careful analysis and patience.
Ligo doesn’t only have self-contained puzzles. This is what often makes me push my rating to 5, good meta puzzles are the undeniable proof that the dev completely mastered their craft. And yeah, Ligo has them.
As you progress through a world, you unlock cubes and creatures that help you reach other puzzles. Simply reaching a puzzle can be very tricky sometimes, the worlds themselves are indeed puzzles. The self-contained puzzles are just an isolated piece of the world, which means you can use the vines, platforms or anything in them once they are completed.
Yet, that’s not all! Once you’ve unlocked everything in a world, a final puzzle awaits you. Somewhere in the world, you need to bring every cube, creature and even yourself and reproduce a certain shape with them. These special puzzles reward you with a piece of cryptic lore, which I honestly never could make sense of haha.
The last things I need to talk about are huge spoilers, don’t read if you haven’t fully completed the game!
Spoiler
When you wander through the first few worlds, you’ll notice reversed, inaccessible puzzles up in the sky. It’s obvious you can’t reach them the first time, but I hate delaying puzzles. So I tried a bunch of things, starting with bringing a cube from another world. You see, every world has a teleporter, this is your way of traveling across the galaxy. So what if I teleported a cube? Eh, no it doesn’t work. Makes sense, that would break pretty much every meta puzzle. So what if there was something hidden? Could be, like a gravity beam at the bottom of the void… but no, nothing.
But as I explored much later worlds, I ended up making a very interesting discovery: I broke the teleporter. It is composed of a roof and a special cube at its base, which can apparently be removed. The thing is, I fell on the roof, reversed by a gravity beam. And yeah, I never thought about it because teleporters are usually completely isolated from the rest of the puzzles, but entering the teleporter in reverse is doable and actually also teleports you in reverse! Such a cool moment.
The best thing is that this isn’t even the only condition to reach the reversed puzzles. Taking the teleporter in reverse is the end, beforehand you need to correctly set up the puzzle elements to help you. That just goes to show how incredible Ligo’s puzzle design is.
But as I explored much later worlds, I ended up making a very interesting discovery: I broke the teleporter. It is composed of a roof and a special cube at its base, which can apparently be removed. The thing is, I fell on the roof, reversed by a gravity beam. And yeah, I never thought about it because teleporters are usually completely isolated from the rest of the puzzles, but entering the teleporter in reverse is doable and actually also teleports you in reverse! Such a cool moment.
The best thing is that this isn’t even the only condition to reach the reversed puzzles. Taking the teleporter in reverse is the end, beforehand you need to correctly set up the puzzle elements to help you. That just goes to show how incredible Ligo’s puzzle design is.
Yet, that’s still not the coolest moment! Breaking the teleporter is very useful for the meta puzzles, it counts as a valid element for the shape puzzles. I thought it would be their only use… until I observed a very strange thing. The roof of the teleporter has a sign on it, and I just found that sign on a random stone block. I had already encountered that sign before, so I thought this might just be a decorative element. I explored the world once more, and the verdict was clear : this is not decoration. The quest to unlock the misery worlds was on, these 4 secret worlds require to find a way to break the teleporter, find the sign, and finally find a way to create that new teleporter. I hadn’t had such a mindblowing moment in a long time, meta puzzles are a thing… but meta secrets like that are on another level.
What more can I say? Ligo didn’t just live up to my expectations, which are quite high, it completely smashed them.
A must-play.
Developer: Anthony Berleur
Publisher: Anthony Berleur
Platforms: Steam, Itch – Windows
Release Date: March 4, 2025