Sokoban: The RPG

Sokoban: The RPG was supposed to be a troll birthday gift from a friend who thought this cheap-looking and weird genre mix would be very questionable.
Well, this is still partially true but Sokoban: The RPG hides a number of very well crafted puzzles that will make anyone’s head hurt.

Sokoban: The RPG is supposed to be an adventure full of puzzles with RPG elements, but in reality this is just a pure puzzle game. I guess there’s a story and sometimes you can find a few items that are all used for one event, so it’s not like there is no “RPG” at all, but yeah.

The puzzle side of this game is the purest form of sokoban, there is absolutely no special mechanics to use or tricks to find. Just rooms with rocks you need to push and bring on the stone floor tiles, then the exit unlocks and you can go to the next puzzle.
This is both a strength and a weakness as it allows the puzzles to thoroughly explore this basic concept and reach insanely high difficulty spikes, but the game also becomes exhausting when you’re nearing the end. When you think about very hard sokoban games, they pretty much always use clever tricks to keep things fresh and surprising, this is not the case in Sokoban: The RPG. While the puzzles are really well made, it unfortunately becomes repetitive and the difficulty can really become crushingly frustrating.

As you probably guessed, the lack of room is THE thing that will drive you insane.
The game has a very smooth difficulty curve, it might even be boring during the first two worlds. But you’ll start to seriously struggle in world 3, and from this point onwards the game reveals its true colors. Paradoxical situations become legion and you need to carefully anticipate everything if you don’t want to get stuck.
What makes this game THAT hard is not only the extremely precise and sometimes long solutions you need to find, but also that you can only undo one move at a time. You cannot try things blindly or chances are you’ll have to start everything over again, the undo in this game is only there to fix accidental moves.
You can skip a few puzzles and come back to them later if you’re really stuck. I hate to use that sort of thing, but I admit it saved my mind from going completely crazy sometimes.

Sokoban: The RPG has a precise structure: each world starts with a riddle, you then get to explore the story a bit deeper, and finally you get puzzles until the next world. The riddles offer a nice break from all this rock-pushing madness, and they are surprisingly good! They often seem impossible at first glance because of the VERY few pieces of information you get, and then you realize there is a precise logic to be found that leads to a unique solution. This is a really good idea and I appreciate it a lot, there’s only one riddle I didn’t like.

I have mixed feelings about the story, though. After the first few worlds, it quickly became clear that things would eventually become very dark, and I was hoping to be wrong. I was not, this talks about subjects like bullying and rape that are not pleasant at all to read. You might even think this is just sick for the sake of being sick if you don’t reach the very end of the game, where you get to know why all of this really happened. I still think this is twisted, but the end makes it less painful.

Sokoban: The RPG is a very high quality game puzzle-wise. While the story isn’t something I found impressive, it allowed for the riddles to exist at least.
I can’t help thinking about all those poor fellows that thought this game would really be an RPG, seeing their face as the game directly opens with a riddle must’ve been so funny. Nope, Sokoban is not an old demon god, sorry!

Another funny thing is that the developer of Sokoban: The RPG also makes Portal 2 maps and I was playing them when I received the game. A crazy coincidence, and if you ever read that Mr. Mike Daas, thanks for all your puzzles.

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Developer: Mike Daas
Publisher: Mike Daas
Platform: Steam – Windows/macOS/Linux
Release Date: September 6, 2018