The Vanilla Chocolate Swirl of Sokobond Express
Don Everhart, Managing Editor
Sokobond Express mixes together two original flavors to see how they taste together. Down to the title, it’s a combination of Sokobond and Cosmic Express. Both of those earlier puzzle games were enjoyable due to how they overlaid classic mechanics with consistent and interesting themes. In Sokobond’s case, the portmanteau in the title references a combination of Sokoban, a puzzle game from 1982, and atomic bonds. It’s a sokoban game with a chemistry theme. Cosmic Express takes the simple act of drawing a line through a maze, removes most of the walls of the maze, and instead arranges pieces on boards that must be connected in sequence. All of that is cloaked in adorably round, bouncy, and colorful space aliens trying to make it through their commute. Sokobond Express leans a little more heavily on the chemical theme of the former, while emphasizing the single-line solutions of the latter. The smooth combination of its inspirations produces something new and, perhaps, more easily digestible. If this game was an ice cream flavor, it would have a Sokobond base with a Cosmic Express ripple.
Like vanilla, the history of Sokobond Express is more complex than it may appear. The underlying mechanics of arranging blocks in just the right order is foundational to videogames. I’m going to take a step back here to unpack things a bit for those in the audience who might not be so nerdy as to immediately read “Sokoban” and have dozens of games and puzzles leap to mind. Like Rogue and roguelike, there’s Sokoban and sokoban. The unifying idea of games that take inspiration from sokoban is the box-pushing puzzle. Sokoban games usually set up single-screen maps with an arrangement of parts that must be pushed into shape. Pushing a few rocks out of the way in Zelda could be described as a sokoban puzzle. Wilmot’s Warehouse plays with the original warehouse setting of Sokoban and makes players manage their own organization of an ever-growing number of kinds of pieces, with the shape of the puzzle emerging between how a player interprets and organizes and the game’s requests.
A molecule is displayed on screen with text that reads, “Most chemical elements are formed by stars. Those elements spread around when the stars explode and can become new things. You are actually made from stardust!”
Cosmic Express (2017) is a little more challenging to trace. It has a cute mode of presentation, all pastel colors and blobby beings who wave as they hop on and off a train. The player constructs the tracks. The goal is to build lines of tracks that bring those adorable beings from their starting point to their destination, usually with a firm starting and endpoint. There are a lot of possible obstacles in this structure: beings don’t share cars, stops are deceptively difficult to reach, and in most puzzles there’s no way for the rails to cross back over themselves. It’s the drawing of that single line that has a long lineage in videogames, going at least as far back as Quantum (which, like Sokoban, is from 1982). But where Quantum and similar arcade-style efforts were about rapidly drawing lines around moving obstacles, Cosmic Express is even more classic in approach: its gameplay has the form of drawing a line through a maze. Mazes permeate videogame design. Cosmic Express is full of mazes and the conditions for the correct path increase in complexity as one proceeds through its levels.
While Sokobond Express has two primary influences, those same influences are built on classic forms. They’re compelling. We make games out of them again and again, adding more structures, relaxing others. I played a game all through a high school algebra class in which a friend and I would pass a piece of paper back and forth, each taking turns drawing a line with an arrow that started at the end of the previous one. I think that we had one more rule, which was that you could only put one bend in a single line. We covered dozens of pages like this. Who knows what was up on the blackboard?
A line is partially drawn from an oxygen atom on the zeta-4 board. There’s a carbon atom missing an ion and two nitrogen atoms to connect.
The process of working out a single, smooth line is key to enjoying Sokobond Express. Each puzzle board concludes with an animation of the starting atom gliding along the player’s line, combining with other atoms to make a molecule of just the right shape while cruising smoothly to the endpoint. If something has impeded the movement of the molecule (say, you weren’t able to rotate it correctly to be able to bond with an atom, so it becomes stuck on it instead), the dance ends with a small bump and an audible “thock.” It’s time to revise. There’s no time pressure and you can drag your line square by square over the grid of the board. You can rip it up and start again, or attempt minute adjustments. Sometimes, solving a puzzle is as simple as switching the angle of approach. Other times, it turns out that creating a whole other path, maybe moving clockwise instead of counter-clockwise, fits the logic. A few puzzles took me a while, plotting out path after path, thocking away, until finally hitting on just the right sequence.
There’s an endgame set of puzzles that switch things up. The funny thing about their design, though, is how they show that the addition of complexity can reduce ambiguity. In that way, I found them to be a breeze compared to some of the more minimal ones offered by the game. I spent more time on the personally perfidious Zeta 4 early on than I did any of the ones in the final set. Mazes with more constraints are easier; finding a path through deceptively open territory is hard.
Turning back to the development of Sokobond Express, things are more complicated than that rule. The game didn’t spring from the existing minds organized by small-press puzzle publisher Draknek and Friends. It’s the product of Venezuelan developer José Hernández, who initially drafted it as an unofficial, prototype mashup of its influences. I wonder what Hernández would think of how I’ve traced the older antecedents of his game. I’m also curious about how the game grew once it became official, wrapped in the crisp, minimal style of Sokobond and with soothing tunes by (now-Sokobond-series) composer Allison Walker. The result is a deliciously smooth blend, which makes me curious about how many loose or overly-set mixes were cooked up along the way.
Alan Hazelden/Draknek provided a review code for this game. As usual for GwG, PR played no part in the resulting writing or publication of this review.
