A Competent Sokoban In Need Of Some Pizazz
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the theming of Cute Astro. Astro is a mouse and the blocks in this sokoban are cheese. That’s the easy part: we’ve got that. He or she is pushing the cheese into holes, and the holes seem to be gateways into space. Alright, now we’re getting hazier: why is Cute Astro in space, and why is cheese airtight? But the kicker is that there’s musical notation running along the bottom of the puzzle, and filling a hole plays that music. It’s about here that we get lost. What’s going on?
If Cute Astro achieves anything, it shows that a puzzle game’s theme doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that it’s nonsensical. Cute Astro could have been an orangutan rolling the bodies of its enemies around a grid, and we would have shrugged and then concentrated on the crate-pushing.
Soko-What?
It’s entirely possible that you haven’t heard of the term ‘sokoban’ before, so let’s cover that off. Sokoban means ‘warehouse keeper’, which is appropriate as the genre wants you to push boxes around. More often than not, a sokoban is top-down with a grid for clarity, and your aim is to nudge boxes until they rest on a ‘goal’ square. What limits you is the layout: there are narrow pathways and enclosed rooms which makes it difficult to get behind a box and push it in the desired direction.
Cute Astro doesn’t bother itself with any complications of that theme. The rad ‘90s mouse can only push the boxes up, down, left or right. They can’t jump, hop through portals or slide the boxes from one end to the other. This is an extremely straightforward sokoban where the greatest complexity is the number of boxes (in this case, cheese) that the mouse has to deal with. There can be up to four at once, and four corresponding holes for them to rest in.
That simplicity puts it on the left-hand side of an ‘Innovation’ sliding scale. This is not a particularly adventurous puzzle game. It hands Cute Astro a double-edged sword: it’s welcoming, simple and purely focused on the puzzling, but it’s also been done hundreds of times before, often by Afil Games, and regularly within the dungeons of other games, like Legend of Zelda. It’s absolutely nothing new.
Sometimes, You Just Need A One-And-Done Puzzle Game
Every few months or so, I get a hankering for a game like Cute Astro. A bitesize puzzle game between Ubisoft open worlds or huge RPGs is welcome. But we get these small-scale puzzlers, and particularly sokoban, more frequently than that, which means Cute Astro has some competition.
In its favour is challenge levels. Cute Astro represents the easier side of puzzle gaming. I found it easier than most of Afil Games output (fascinatingly, we reviewed this at the same time as Hummingbird Garden, which took the opposite tack). We got halfway through the thirty levels without breaking a sweat, and the final fifteen levels weren’t overly onerous. It means that Cute Astro is at least in something of a niche: it’s a sokoban for newbie box pushers. If you haven’t played a sokoban before, you could do worse than Cute Astro.
Otherwise, the same criticisms and commendations apply: the ones we give to every Afil Games sokoban. I’d love a hint system or a means to skip puzzles. It’s natural that there will be a layout that a player cannot untangle, but Cute Astro offers no help to solve them. If you can’t do a puzzle, your game is effectively over. You have to hope that someone has released a video walkthrough of the game on Youtube.
There’s also no move counters, which would make such a simple and easy improvement. If I could compare my moves to another player’s and note that I completed it in 13 compared to their 12 moves, then I would have something to chase.
A Sokoban That’s Missing Something
But these are never debilitating, and would only elevate Cute Astro slightly. It’s a fine game, concentrating on the important elements: namely the quality of the puzzles, the clarity of the presentation, and creating enough stuff to keep you going for an hour.
In that regard, Cute Astro achieves its aims. These are strong puzzles, a little on the easy side, sure, but focused on layouts that have you solving particular problems. They may seem immediately obvious, but there will always be a trip-hazard. Perhaps one of the cheeses is nigh-on impossible to get behind, or you keep accidentally slotting one cheese into a corner (no one puts babybel in the corner).
I’m torn with Cute Astro. It does its job with radical, early-’90s style, but it’s also a bit hollow. There is nothing wrong with the sokoban puzzling, but there’s also nothing remarkable about it either. Having reviewed a few recently, I feel fatigue creeping in, which is why I lean towards a high 3 out of 5 rather than a low 3.5. If this is your first sokoban, nudge it up to a 3.5.
Clearly I need a break from my sokoban reviewing. And not an intergalactic break with the walls filled in with cheese.
Important Links
A Rockstar Mouse Takes Centre Stage In Cute Astro – https://www.thexboxhub.com/a-rockstar-mouse-takes-centre-stage-in-cute-astro/
Buy from the Xbox Store for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/cute-astro-xbox-series/9P0PDRMKT0XQ/0010
