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I think Sokoban is one of the first puzzle games ever made. The Japanese company Spectrum Holobyte developed it in 1984, so it already had its 20 years anniversary.
It is not only one of the first; it is also one of the best. In the years from the development of this game until today, a lot of Sokoban clones have been made. If you google it, you will get about 150.000 results. There is everything from online java versions, to bigger games like Docker Sokoban.
Sokoban is a very simple game. There are a lot of crates that need to be pushed to the right spaces. To do this, you are in control of a little man, who can walk and push. The first 5-6 levels are fairly easy, and won’t take a lot of time. Then it slowly becomes harder and harder. When you have completed the first 15-20 levels, you will have to think many steps forward to advance further. There are 50 levels in the game, so you can play it for many hours.
If you would like to challenge your friends, you can play multiplayer. Then you play in turn, and will get points after the number of moves used and the time passed. And if this is not enough, there is an integrated level editor, so you can make your own levels. When I was a kid, the guys and me used a lot of time making levels to challenge each other.
The sound in Sokoban is nothing to brag about. The only sound there is in the game is the steps of the man when he moves, and a little melody when a level is complete. This is played via the pc-speaker. The graphics are nice, if you think of how old the game is. But these things are really not important in this game, as it’s the puzzle that you should focus on.
All in all, I think Sokoban is one of the best puzzle games ever made. It has kept me puzzled for hours, and I have really enjoyed it. If you like puzzles, this is really a “must have”.
As this game is very old, it will run very fast even in Dosbox standard settings, so you would want to reduce the amount of cpu-cycles made in Dosbox by pressing CTRL-F11 multiple times.
To get the same quality of screenshots, you have to change a setting in the DOSBox.conf file! Machine type should be changed from VGA (default) into TANDY.
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