Chesskoban [Browser]

Chesskoban is a Sokoban-style puzzle game demo released by TCHOW in 2013 as part of a puzzle hunt series. As the name suggests, it mixes Chess mechanics with sokoban puzzles.

This is probably the first puzzle that makes you go "Huh... Okay..."

If you don't know what sokoban (倉庫番) is, it's a style of puzzle created by Hiroyuki Imabayashi in 1981 in which a character moves boxes around a warehouse. Boxes can be pushed one block at a time in the direction the player moves, and cannot be pulled. The goal is the get all the boxes in the level to set points. On its own, it's pretty boring. Many levels can take WAAAAAAY too long to complete, and a lack of undo makes it an exercise in torture more than puzzle-solving.

This one is super clever.

However, it's pretty much the archetypal puzzle game template. 'Sokoban with a twist' describes probably at least 30% of freeware puzzle games, especially ones made in Puzzlescript. There's a reason it's a huge meme in the Mystery community; the concept is incredibly overplayed and it's fairly difficult to make a truly good sokoban.

But forget all that; this game is fantastic.

I LOVE super compact puzzles like this, they're great for dummies like me because of the low entropy.

Instead of controlling a player character, you pick a chess piece to move. It moves corresponding to the usual chess rules, and if it hits a box where it will land, it pushes it by the same manner in which it moved. Thus, if a rook 3 spaces away hits a box, it will move by 3 spaces in the same direction. This movement can pass boxes, pieces, and even completely open gaps. Like chess, pieces can also be opposing colors which allows them to capture each other to free space on the board. They don't alternate turns like normal chess, but that idea would probably cause more annoyance than clever puzzles. And of course, it has an undo (and reset) button, like all good puzzle games.

Prime example of the difference from typical sokoban: this box would be a 'dead box' in normal sokoban (there would be no way to move it in a meaningful way) but the diagonal movement allows you to push it into a usable position.

The puzzles are nice and inventive, alternating between a nice introduction of mechanics and utilization of them. There is one branch in the route which contains 2 extra levels for whatever reason, comprising 20 in total.  The entire demo takes between 15 and 40 minutes to complete, nice and short and sweet. All of the puzzles have elegant solutions and allow for quite a bit of freedom in most of them. They're not too hard although some of them definitely require some forward thinking.

Yes, really.

There was a full version in development as well as a mobile release, but it seems it hasn't come to fruition yet. Apparently there was hope for a demo release in October 2020, but as of writing this it's still nowhere to be seen. You can play this demo on TCHOW's website.