Shrink Rooms

Difficulty : 3/5 (Rather Hard) Global : 1.5/5 (Decent) My website : [url=https://anokturnus.review/]The Review Principle[/url] Curator page : [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44695991-Anokturnus/]Anokturnus[/url] Shrink Rooms is a sokoban puzzle game with an interesting concept: you’re trapped in deadly rooms whose walls slowly shrink as you move. This is a turn-based game, you have all the time you want to think and plan your moves; the order in which the walls are going to shrink and the number of turns you have before they do so are all indicated. You need to push crates to activate all the buttons that open the exit, and then reach it before being reduced to a pulp. I thought Shrink Rooms would be a small game… and wow, was I wrong. There are hundreds of puzzles, they all come in groups of 3-5 consecutive puzzles that progressively get harder. Each of these puzzle packs explore a subtlety of the mechanics, they are designed to be small and balanced with a few difficulty spikes sometimes. You then unlock bonus puzzles that go a lot more in-depth and are much, much harder. If you know me at least a little, you know hard stuff is my domain. And yet, I didn’t really e…

🔹 EXPECTATIONS: a sokoban game with quirky mechanics. 🔹 REALITY: a lengthy sokoban/pathfinding game with repetitive levels. 🔶 In Shrink rooms (SR) you need to reach the exit before the walls close in too much. It's sokoban because you need to push boxes out of the way, but it's also pathfinding, as you need to do it in a maximum number of moves, too. 🔸 It has a minimal plot, developed between the 5 chapters through comic-style vignettes. The level selection menu is traversable and acts as a level at times, too. It's a sort of museum, with elements you can inspect for (satirical) info and lore of the world. 🔸 The game is fun but it has a problem that I rarely find: it has too much content. At first you solve levels like each presents a new challenge, until you realise that it's just the same trick (solution) with different elements. It's as if devs made extra levels but they didn't pick the most interesting ones, they just chucked them all in. There are a bit over 300 levels in total, grouped by their underlying solutions. What is presented as a group of 3-5 levels, could have been more interesting with 1-3. SR seems to also be self-aware of this. It doesn't have a hint syst…

This game gets real hard, real fast, but the design ideas and execution are top-notch. A really fun one for anyone up for a tough puzzler challenge.

I'm really enjoying this game... super clever and unique spin on a classic puzzle genre. It's definitely worth picking up. My two main nitpicks would be that it's tough to hold some of these puzzles in your head, so I end up reverse-engineering a lot of them just by fiddling around, which sometimes feels like a non-solve when I solve it. It could also use a Steam Deck update, although I did make and share a controller profile that works nicely.

I played through about 50 levels so far and the game is fun. The game introduces each mechanic in a gentle way through a couple of tutorial-like levels, but also has some hard challenges I have not solved yet. The main mechanic, a shrinking sokoban-style puzzle works very well.