Shrink Rooms

Shrink Rooms is a sokoban puzzle game with an interesting concept: you’re trapped in deadly rooms whose walls slowly shrink as you move.
This is a turn-based game, you have all the time you want to think and plan your moves; the order in which the walls are going to shrink and the number of turns you have before they do so are all indicated.

You need to push crates to activate all the buttons that open the exit, and then reach it before being reduced to a pulp.
I thought Shrink Rooms would be a small game… and wow, was I wrong. There are hundreds of puzzles, they all come in groups of 3-5 consecutive puzzles that progressively get harder. Each of these puzzle packs explore a subtlety of the mechanics, they are designed to be small and balanced with a few difficulty spikes sometimes.
You then unlock bonus puzzles that go a lot more in-depth and are much, much harder. If you know me at least a little, you know hard stuff is my domain.
And yet, I didn’t really enjoy Shrink Rooms.

While on paper the concept seems very promising, in reality it becomes annoying quite fast. I liked the first world, but once the second world introduces the slime mechanic, everything slowly starts becoming complete chaos.
Even if everything is indicated, it’s just impossible to really anticipate every chain reaction. So you end up trying things like any puzzle game, but the turn-based nature of the game renders everything frustrating. There’s only one correct combination of inputs for every puzzle, you can’t waste a single move.
The mechanics are also cumulative, meaning the portals introduced in world 3 also play with slime. The more you progress, the messier it gets. The rules themselves are quite hard to grasp sometimes, there are plates in the hubs that explain them but the very poor english translation doesn’t help.
It’s really tough to criticize that game, I genuinely feel like the puzzle design is very good and creative. The concept just didn’t click with me, I didn’t have that much fun. I still completed all the main levels because they were small and clever enough for me not to lose interest, however the bonus puzzles are just far too big and chaotic. I didn’t even try them past world 2; the difficulty rating is probably not accurate as a result, I’m sorry for that.

There’s something else that further worsened my experience: bugs. I refuse to believe Shrink Rooms has been playtested, EVERY SINGLE LEVEL containing slime or portals is bugged. How can you release a broken game like that? They are not even triggered by obscure interactions.
For example, once a portal is naturally destroyed because of the walls shrinking, you just have to undo once… and now there’s a hole instead of the portal.
Good job, now you can restart the puzzle. Because it’s not like the portal is still secretly there. No, it’s doomed. You can have fun going out of bounds though, it’s funny once or twice.
Slime is completely bugged too, and that’s a much bigger problem. Just like the broken portals, broken slime can also force a reset: undo after a slime has fallen into a hole, and it won’t respawn. But the worst is that sometimes, slime will glue or unglue things when it’s not supposed to. The first time it happened to me, I thought this was part of the rules but… well, no. In such a precise game full of intricate interactions, this is not good at all.

These are just a few examples but there are many more! I tolerate bugs when they only happen occasionally and don’t have a big impact. The bugs in Shrink Rooms are omnipresent and unacceptable.

Some other minor problems also affect the game.
Shrink Rooms is divided into 5 chapters, each of them having their own hub. The thing is, the hubs consist of very long corridors. And if you want to go back to world 1 when you’re in world 5… yup, no fast travel, you need to walk through every chapter. You also can’t undo after a reset to go back before it, that’s a feature pretty much every sokoban game has nowadays.
Urgh seriously, those are very basic things to think about!

Shrink Rooms is really polished otherwise, good animations, good visuals, good sound effects… but when it comes to the most important things, everything crumbles. What a shame!

I clearly can’t recommend a game in such a state, that’s out of question. I’m thinking that maybe all these problems are what truly spoiled my pleasure and exacerbated the frustrating side of the game. We’ll see if it ever gets fixed.

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Developers: Mat-Rix, Pone Games
Publisher: Pone Games
Platform: Steam – Windows
Release Date: May 29, 2025