Puzzle Depot

Very fun puzzle game

8.5/10 Massive sokoban with possibly the best story I’ve seen in a puzzle game where the puzzles are baked into the environment. What is it: Imagine your job is to push boxes like some people push paper. Day in. Day out. Just pushing boxes around a warehouse with your only highlight being the occasional barrel. A mutant bug-infested apocalyptic disaster would start to sound like a welcome alternative. Well good news, this is the premise of Puzzle Depot. The first game I’ve played that fully embodies its sokoban-genre roots by starting the player off as a warehouse worker (the word ‘sokoban’ comes from the Japanese word 倉庫番 which means “a person in charge of a warehouse”). However, it quickly replaces warehouses with volcanic caverns and boxes with giant curled up pillbugs. While a traditional sokoban tasks players with pushing boxes around to achieve a prescribed win-state, this game shakes the formula up a lot by introducing items that alter how the player interacts with objects, giving RPG vibes. For example, with bare hands the player can push boxes, but pick up a crowbar and now you can break open certain boxes to reveal additional items needed to solve puzzles. Does the solution require you to walk past a giant cockroach that will gobble you up in a second? If only you could figure out how to traverse that puddle of acid to pick up a sewer lid and block the roach’s attacks. At the time of this writing, I have finished the main story but have still not finished the 2 end-game levels that give a little backstory to everything. Also, there has been an announcement of a DLC that explores some random dinosaurs one may stumble upon in the main story. The game packs an insane amount of content for the price. How hard is it: ★★★★☆. Difficulty is a tricky one with this one. I am more than 100 hrs into this game and recently finished the main story line. If I wasn’t trying to finish all the alternate ways of beating each level, this time would easily be in the 30-40 hrs. The puzzles you need to solve to progress the story ranged in the easy to medium difficulty - but nail-biting on the fun-scale. The true difficulty of this game lies in the alternate options given to beat levels. Each level has multiple ways of completion. Finish the level while holding certain items, or killing a certain number of creatures, etc. All the extra challenges add a little bit of difficulty because they require you to think about how all the separate puzzles interact so that you don’t use an item if not needed or save an item so you can kill that extra bug. But it isn’t until you attempt the Auditor challenge do you really have to lock in and get your mutant ducks in order. Auditor requires you to complete a level within a certain number of literal steps. To do this you have to know exactly which puzzles to solve, which to ignore, which items to use and save and all the shortcuts. To do all this you need to utilize one of the most interesting elements I’ve seen in a puzzle game - your life meter. Hearkening back to those RPG vibes, you have life in this game and die after taking too many hits. This component is redundant if your goal is just to complete a level by any means necessary. Just save a lot and save often. There is always a way to complete a level without taking damage - that's actually an alternate challenge. To find the shortest route for the auditor challenge, however, means you sometimes need to sacrifice your life points to take shortcuts. Remember that puzzle of acid before the sewer lid. There may be a way of bypassing it without getting hurt - but you’d need to walk all the way around an island of rusty cars increasing your steps two-fold. If you have enough life to spare you could eat one heart and walk right through it. Just make sure you have enough life to get to the end of the level. This is the first game I’ve played where your life count is a component to be considered when solving puzzles. I’ve spent more than half my…

very fun sokoban-like, with bits of drod and even drod rpg included. optimization (for the sickos) and managing resources add more flavor than typical in the genre. super easy recommend for the box pushers, def deserves more love before jonathan blow's boxer takes the spotlight