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.