[b]3/10[/b]
Help the dog escape the dungeon by pushing a block onto the button that opens the door. Avoid traps and time your movements.
[b]What is it:[/b] A mixture of Maze and Precision Platformer pretending to be a Sokoban game. The only thing that's Sokoban-lilke is that there is a crate that needs to be pushed onto a designated spot. But there's nothing else in the gameplay that's Sokoban. There aren't any really tight rooms to wiggle out of. There's one box only, so there's no careful choreography required to keep boxes out of each other's way. Pushing the box slides it until it hits a wall, not just to the next spot. The game isn't really on a grid, sometimes traps are placed between what would normally be a grid, and the player "dog" moves freely, pixel by pixel, which is in itself a terrible thing. The game requires almost no logic. Half the game is finding a path from the starting point to the end spot. The second half of the game? Carefully timing your moves to avoid the short-cycled traps. And while figuring the timing of one trap is somewhat easy, a few times the traps come in pairs with different timings, so you spend a lot of time just waiting for them to get in sync. Oh, and there's no undo, you can very easily accidentally step onto a trap and die, and every time you make a mistake, you start from scratch. The fact that the dog isn't restricted to grid movements is terrible, I would often get snagged by a pixel of a corner and not be able to move, breaking my timing, or worse, I would accidentally step on a corner of a trap and die after spending tens of minutes to finish a level on my way to the exit.
[b]How hard is it:[/b] Thinking: super easy. Timing: annoyingly hard.
[b]How long is it:[/b] 70 levels, many easy, many frustrating. It took me more than 3 hours to finish it.
[b]Level design:[/b] Bad. Many levels seem super complicated, with lots of traps and walls and paths between them, but the solution just requires two or three moves bypassing all of that. Almost all the levels only use about half of the space, with only one obvious path you can take. From the start, 3 of the 4 possible directions are deadly, with only one viable option, and then it continues on like that, so "solving" the maze isn't even a challenge. Then there are a few (maybe 10?) levels with doubled traps in your way, which are so frustrating because timing them is hard. In the end, the strategy that worked for me is try to reach that spot without mistakes in a fixed time, figure out the timing for passing the first trap, then simply count how many times the first trap pulses and try to pass after increasing pulses. Die and repeat until it finally works on the 3rd, 7th, or even 12th pulse.
[b]Quality:[/b] Poor. The game looks "cute" for kids, but the graphics are basic and repetitive. The keyboard has support only for movement, the UI requires clicks to restart or quit, the quit button is only present when playing a level, not on the level select screen. There's a separate key for pushing the crate, you can't just move into it, but that key only works if you're not pressing another key, so to push a block in your direction of moving, you need to: move to the block keeping the Right key pressed, release the Right key, press the Z key, release the Z key, press the Right key to keep moving. If you try to tap Z while moving right, it does nothing. The keys are not configurable, you're stuck with the Z key for push. The achievements are awarded at the start of the target level, not the end, so you get the last one before actually finishing the game. The level design is often bad. The game speed is both too fast, since you can accidentally move into a trap if you try to move a tiny bit sideways, and too slow, since moving across the screen on a large level takes too long. On the corner of the box you're both behind the box, since you cannot move forward past it, and not behind the box, since you're not centered enough to be able to push it.
[b]Worth the price:[/b] For the time spent in the game, yes. For the quality of the game, no.
[b]Most positive aspect for me:[/b] Hard enough as a precision game.
[b]Most negative aspect for me:[/b] Poor level design.
[b]Also consider:
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1592880/Sokocat__Islands/?curator_clanid=25928931]Sokocat Islands[/url], cute and easy Sokoban with a pet, but much better done.
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1409180/Of_Mice_and_Moggies/?curator_clanid=25928931]Of Mice And Moggies[/url], very well done logic puzzler with animals.
[quote]For more puzzle game reviews, news and everything puzzle-related, follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/25928931-Puzzle-Lovers/]Puzzle Lovers[/url] and check out our [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/puzzlelovers]Steam group[/url].[/quote]
