SokoChess

Played on Steam Deck. Sokobon for sure, getting pretty tricky in the last third. Nice classical music, good puzzles, affordable price, recommended.

SokoChess has a neat concept, but I just didn’t enjoy the game whatsoever. The core idea, of a block-pushing puzzle game where the blocks (chess pieces) can move and kill you, just turns out not to be fun. In practice, there are additional issues. In particular, it just feels bad to make moves and then have your pieces get captured, when the game doesn’t even display which tiles are threatened. The behavior of opposing chess pieces is completely deterministic, so it’s annoying that the game doesn’t show you in advance what will happen after your next move, à la Slay the Spire or Into the Breach. This would make it much easier to visualize your moves. Other than that, the game also feels rather cheap: low production values, ugly main menu, etc. I wouldn't particularly mind those aspects if I enjoyed the core gameplay though.

Clever chess piece-based Sokoban. Good and hard.

Pros: - Interesting and challenging puzzles. - Nice music. - Work on multiple OSes. Cons: - No save sync between devices. Had to redo half of the puzzles... - No undo, quite frustrating to set things up again once I made a mistake

The game lacks some pretty common quality of life features that most chess games would have (threatened squares in particular). Paired with the high difficulty and particularly high difficulty curve makes the game quickly feel like a slog. I appreciate that I can skip any level, but if a level is not clicking or feels like too much busy work then it's almost certain that the next level will be the same but even more. I never felt like the difficulty opened up again with new concepts, rather each level was more punishing than the last.

Definitely the most challenging of the Daisy Games Sokoban library, but also one of the most creative and rewarding. That said, if I ever have to do Level 65 again, I would probably just cry.