Toroban

I checked these guys out at PAX East, this is a pretty brutal sokoban game with a lot of really inventive twists. It's somewhat easy to dismiss this as a Patrick's Parabox ripoff but it is genuinely so much more than that. The recursive puzzles and meta-puzzle mechanics are total brainbusters for me, but in a good way - every puzzle so far has been fair, unlike Baba is You. Definitely recommend this one if you want a meaty puzzle game.

Toroban is a competent puzzle game with solid mechanics, clear graphical design, and a thorough exploration of the interactions between the various game pieces. It looks and sounds good. It takes a very deliberate step away from the trend of discovery of mechanics through play by stating in simple terms the exact mechanics that you will encounter in the following puzzles and how they work. This sets it apart from games centered around discovery through play, like Monster's Expedition or Stephen's Sausage Roll. It's fresh and I don't mind it. If you enjoy the process of discovery, you can always ignore the signs. Having the mechanics spelled out for you doesn't stop the game from being hard, however. It starts relatively gentle and then ramps up the difficulty considerably. I wouldn't say that the game gets so hard that it stops being fun. The fun stops for an entirely different reason... Despite the points I've listed in its favor, I can't in good conscience recommend it for a single reason: the game designer knowingly, repeatedly, and explicitly does not respect your time. One of the biggest criticisms of sokoban-like games are situations in which the problem is relatively easy but the execution is tedious. This game not only commits that sin repeatedly, but bakes it into every aspect of this game to the point where it feels like the game designer is trying to make some kind of artistic statement out of it. I've listed some specific examples I encountered below, but it's everywhere: 1. A main mechanic of the game is moving into and out of toroidal regions. The animation for this transition is nice, but not fast. I started to trying to move characters underneath the transition by memory because I wanted to execute moves faster than the animation plays. Sometimes this resulted in someone getting lost. 2. To get to the post-game, you must push every single block in the overworld to a specific location on the map. That's 37 blocks. Many of the blocks take at least 30s to push there one by one (while sprinting). 3. As a follow-on to point one that isn't directly related to the game design, there is a sign that tells you that the post-game is (as of writing this review) under construction and can't currently be completed. This sign is locked behind completing the last world in the game, meaning it's entirely plausible that you (like me) will waste a bunch of time pushing blocks around just to find out it was entirely pointless to do so for an unspecified period of time. 4. My least favorite puzzle in the game is one in which there is one actual problem to solve, and about seven different busywork steps to get to the point where you can execute the one actual problem (the levels don't have titles, but the one I'm referring to is the last puzzle of the "Water" puzzles in the "Fall" section). There are many puzzles like this, though in my opinion this is the most egregious example of it. They're not hard, they're just annoying. 5. Additionally, there are many puzzles that take a single problem and then simply repeat it several times. Solving the initial problem is interesting; doing it five times after that is not. You can find secret areas while "inverted" in which you will often find puzzles that are rehashes of puzzles in the normal areas, but they take longer. The most egregious example of this is one of the first puzzles in the game in which you have a series of one way gates that force you to move a block one section forward each time you loop through the entire map. The secret area rehash of this puzzle is the exact same layout, just with a bunch more sections so it takes three times as long to finish. Pointless busywork designed to waste your time. 6. This game has a big focus on meta puzzles, including puzzles that take a standard puzzle game QoL feature of restarting levels and making it part of the solution. This is cool. What isn't cool is having a section of puzzles that require you to reset the state of the world at…

I think this game is surprisingly deep. On the one hand, it's just a bunch of little puzzles and nice gentle music - at first I expected it to get monotonous, fast. But they mix things up very nicely by throwing new things at you - there is more variety than i expected. But what I find cool is there's kind of a level unlocking meta puzzle that's overlays everything. It pulled me. So I think it's a cool game. Highly recommended.