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22 reviews · 8 essays
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Baghal: a model that never tried to solve anything drew solvable Sokoban 77.4% of the time — Fukai Reads
A preprint by Sina Baghal (arXiv:2608.15958, not peer-reviewed). When a machine generates Sokoban levels, the usual step is to run a solver on every candidate to check that it can be finished. This manuscript reports that a 4.9M-parameter model trained only to fill in hidden tiles — with no solver, no reward and no solvability labels — produces solvable puzzles 77.4% of the time. Of the failures, 94.5% become solvable by deleting a single interior wall, which lifts effective solvability to 98.7%.
The Verb of Pushing — What Sokoban Invented by Removing "Pull"
Sokoban's minimal grammar of push-only, no-pull invented the deadlock as a form of difficulty. A design reading of the pushing verb through three heirs: Sokobond, Baba Is You, and Patrick's Parabox.
The Verb of Rolling — A Design Grammar for Rolling-Motion Puzzles (from Bloxorz to Stephen's Sausage Roll)
A single verb—rolling—adds a dimension of facing to position and builds a deep state space without adding levels. From Kula World to Stephen's Sausage Roll, a design reading of rolling-motion puzzles.
Recursion as a Puzzle Grammar — The Nested Logic of Patrick's Parabox and Recursed
A box inside a box, and inside it the same board again. From Recursed to Patrick's Parabox and Cocoon, a reading of nested-puzzle design and why recursion runs so deep.
Counterpoint on Stephen's Sausage Roll — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Stephen's Sausage Roll 9/10. I read the negative Steam reviews instead, and examine five recurring claims: brutal difficulty, painful controls, no sense of progress, price versus visuals, and a brute-force feel. Where I agree, and where I push back.
When Fewer Verbs Make a Richer Game — The Lineage of Subtractive Design
Sokoban, Snakebird, Stephen's Sausage Roll, A Monster's Expedition, Bonfire Peaks. A maker's-eye survey of subtractive design, the lineage that deepens difficulty without adding verbs, built around one question: why does less become more?
Counterpoint on Baba Is You — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave Baba Is You a 9.5/10. I sort five recurring negative-review patterns from Steam, Metacritic, and the critical press — the difficulty wall, the single-solution charge, variable explosion, frustration overtaking fun, and uneven difficulty between adjacent levels — and decide where I agree and where I push back.
The Lineage of Meta-Puzzles — When Rules Themselves Started Moving
Where did the idea of manipulating the rules themselves come from? A short genealogy from the single verb of Sokoban to the language of Baba Is You.
Related reviews
Ittle Dew
A top-down puzzle adventure in which a castaway adventurer works through block-pushing rooms using only the items she picked up — a fire sword, an ice wand, a portal wand. Released by Ludosity in 2013.
puzzlesokoban-likeadventureFelix The Reaper
An isometric puzzle game in which Felix, a reaper who never stops dancing, may only walk where there is shade. You flip the sun between two positions to reshape the shadows, push and pull props to cast new ones, and arrange each mortal's fatal accident. Made by Kong Orange, narrated by Patrick Stewart.
puzzlesokoban-likeadventurePaquerette Down the Bunburrows
A 2D puzzle game about cornering rabbits down in a warren. The bunnies flee by fixed rules, so you close their escape routes in advance with traps, a pickaxe and carrots. Five themed depths, over a hundred bunnies and a stack of secrets underneath, made by Bunstack.
puzzlesokoban-likepathfindingTetrobot and Co.
A grid-based thinking puzzle in which you steer Psychobot, a microscopic repair robot, swallowing and spitting blocks to mend the insides of a broken giant. Swing Swing Submarine build fifty-odd levels out of little more than three materials — wood, sand, stone — and one rule: like sticks only to like.
puzzlelogicsokoban-likePaper Trail
A top-down puzzle game in which the screen is a sheet of paper: fold it over and the terrain on the reverse joins the front, building a path for Paige as she journeys through a hand-drawn world. From Newfangled Games.
puzzleadventurepathfindingJelly Is Sticky
A grid-based sokoban where you push, stick and deform blocks of jelly — each color carrying its own stickiness, rigidity and deformability — across 300-plus handmade puzzles. A Lunarch Studios game that grows deep contraptions from a small toolkit.
puzzlesokoban-likeKine
Roll and rotate three musical machines — Quat the drum, Roo the accordion, Euler the trombone — through 120-plus 3D puzzles across a theatrical city, reading how each body tumbles like a weighted die. A spatial puzzle from Chump Squad (Gwen Frey).
puzzlesokoban-likelogicPipe Push Paradise
A 3D sokoban about restoring plumbing on a lonely island: push pipes across a grid and, by their shape, they roll and stand upright to route the water. One verb — push — yet pipe shapes and gravity open a solution space with no visible floor. By Corey Martin and Teo Zamudio.
puzzlesokoban-likeCan of Wormholes
A grid-based sokoban where you steer a worm that crawls Snake-style-head forward, tail shrinking-to fill target holes with a body of the exact right shape and length. A handful of verbs (push, grow, slice) hide layers of interactions that fire only under precise conditions. By munted finger.
puzzlesokoban-likeSnakebird Primer
A calm, grid-based movement puzzle where a fruit-eating snakebird uses gravity and its own lengthening body to reach the exit. With blocks, portals, spikes and unlimited undo, Noumenon Games' primer hands over the original Snakebird's brutal grammar one gentle step at a time.
puzzlesokoban-likeIsles of Sea and Sky
A memory-less castaway pushes blocks — and only pushes them — through traps and portals across an open ocean of islands. Each island twists one mechanic while a wordless myth unfolds, growing a bottomless labyrinth from one verb. From Cicada Games.
puzzlesokoban-likeexplorationA Good Snowman Is Hard To Build
A Sokoban-like puzzle where you roll snowballs that grow on fresh snow, then stack them large-to-small to build a snowman. The only verb is push. A small, exacting work from Alan Hazelden, co-creator of Sokobond, hiding a second game inside its garden.
puzzlesokoban-likeSokobond
A 2D Sokoban puzzle where you move a single atom around a grid and bond it with the atoms it touches to assemble a target molecule. Each atom's number of free 'hands' is the only grammar; tiles that break, double, and rotate bonds arrive one per chapter. By Alan Hazelden and Lee Shang Lun, 2014, scored by Allison Walker.
puzzlesokoban-likelogicEnglish Country Tune
A Sokoban-flavoured abstract puzzler in which you flip a single cube edge-over-edge through pale 3D space. Each world rewrites the rules -- drawing lines, ferrying larvae, inverting gravity -- and offers no hints. The first commercial game from Stephen Lavelle (increpare).
puzzlesokoban-likeabstractVoid Stranger
A 2D Sokoban puzzler in which you lift a floor tile with a rod and set it down elsewhere, descending a forgotten labyrinth past traps and foes. From a handful of verbs grow bottomless puzzles and a hidden story — made by System Erasure.
puzzlesokoban-likemeta-puzzleCosmic Express
A route-drawing puzzle: lay down train tracks to pick up and drop off cute alien passengers in the right order, fitting one winding path into a tight grid.
puzzlepathfindingsokoban-likeSnakebird
A snakebird grows by eating fruit, and must use its lengthening body to solve grid-based puzzles. A thoughtful sokoban-like about shape and constraint.
puzzlesokoban-likeBonfire Peaks
A Sokoban about closure — carry your belongings to the bonfire and let them burn.
puzzlesokoban-likeA Monster's Expedition
Push trees to make logs and bridge to the next island. An open-world Sokoban.
sokoban-likeobservationPatrick's Parabox
A textbook example of recursive Sokoban, structured as a master class in pedagogy.
sokoban-likemeta-puzzleBaba Is You
A language Sokoban where you push the rules themselves around.
meta-puzzlesokoban-likeStephen's Sausage Roll
Grill a sausage evenly on all six sides. The difficulty is almost a joke.
sokoban-like
