SOKOBOT

SOKOBOT feels more like a programming game than a programming puzzle game. Designing a working solution for a level requires minimal insight; you'll probably only be challenged by diving deep into optimization. Yet, a lack of interface features makes optimization feel more tedious than it should. You can't copy & paste code blocks; you can't loop code blocks; you can't reorder existing robots in your code rack for clarity; there are no shortcut commands like returning to start position. If a robot's code begins with empty spaces they aren't ignored, but rather treated as wait commands. This means in order to synchronize multiple robots' movements you have to either position some robots mid-routine so their code doesn't start with empty spaces, or make use of sleep and wake commands. The former feels awkward, and yet the latter feels inefficient for optimization. Your robots' movements depend on their facing, so you have to constantly visualize which way is forward for all of them separately, which becomes more and more cumbersome the deeper you are into a lengthy solution. There is no feature to jump to a command during production to quickly check for errors or simply to verify the orientations of all the robots and blocks. (Later in the game block rotation can matter too.) Instead you have to fiddle with a speed setting that only increases when toggled until it resets. You can increment step by step but then the keyboard shortcut for playing a solution stops it instead of resuming. Yes, you can use the mouse to click on play after going step by step but it's a strange oversight in my opinion. Up to nine consecutive identical commands can be stacked into a single instruction slot. This is useful for achieving solutions that minimize the number of robots used- in many cases down to a single robot- but such solutions feel like a slog to implement because every individual instruction slot still needs to be manually filled one by one, and that lone robot will probably have to travel long distances to get everything done. In addition, stacking commands for multiple robots makes it even more awkward to synchronize them without using sleep and wake commands, so you're just nudged into more inefficiency. I don't think it's a bad game but it's difficult to recommend over something like Opus Magnum or MOLEK-SYNTEZ. For me at least, the point at which solutions feel too conceptually trivial for how much work it feels like to implement (and optimize) them comes too early in SOKOBOT.

POSITIVE, BUT.... The game is very relaxing and satisfying. Unfortunately, the lack of punishment when collisions occur ruins the challenge of scoring points in the ranking. It bothers and irritates me to try to reduce commands and cycles using the null action trick. It seems like dirty logic, something like a cheat. This feature completely destroyed my enjoyment of playing. The bot's own expression (confused and irritated) shows that something is wrong and that it should not continue. I think collisions should interrupt the command sequence.

Great automation puzzler similar to my favorite Opus Magnum, where the assembly arms are in this case little robots. The contraint of having a limited number of commands per bot makes some stages quite challenging.

just a good game that forces you to think how to program the bots we interacted with

If you remember Lightbot or the Codex of Alchemical Engineering (or Opus Magnum) you should already know what's going on here. It's great fun, it's easy to pick up and quickly gets much more difficult, it's got histograms, the bots are coloured like evangelion units, you already know if you want to play this or not!

So far, I really enjoy the game. Tricky puzzles, lots of thinking. The only caveat is my brain making things much more complicated than they have to be.

可爱是可爱，但调试系统不完善简直噩梦，不能暂停，也没有办法设定断点。 再就是引导不足，EX-1那一关我费了很大力气把管道和方块放在对应位置，摆放物却没按预期传送下去，看了别人的视频才知道必须在摆放之前把方块和管道焊在一起，前功尽弃。虽然地面上有个焊接装置但是谁知道那是干什么的啊。要是配一些文字说明就好了，不然摸索任务目标都要花很久。 这个游戏还更新吗？能不能有bug的程序也提供gif？小机器人因为bug像没头的苍蝇一样跑来跑去更可爱。