We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
Pointed out in a post on Metafilter by long-time user pwnguin, Soko Striker is fun, and not excessively challenging, free Soccer-themed Sokoban game by Axylaric on itch.io.
The idea is to get all the balls (up to three in a level) into the goal net. The ball slides when you kick it, continuing to move until something interacts with it. We could call these “ice block” style Sokoban pieces. One wrinkle in this is that the balls can’t cross the white lines at the edges of the board, or it’s a foul and you have to start over. There is no undo command, only a retry, so think carefully before making a move. You yourself can walk outside the line freely, and will often have to.
Those yellow barriers in the screenshot above are simple blockers, mere walls that the ball will collide with and come to a halt.
Later on you find these other players on the checkerboard pitch. If the ball rolls into an arrow, the player will automatically kick it in that arrow’s facing direction. You can adjust the direction a player faces by kicking them, a trick you’ll have to use a lot.
Near the end of the game’s 30 puzzles you’ll find these traffic cones. You can push them a single space at a time by kicking them, much like how one would move a Sokoban crate. Other players can kick crates too. A cone can block a ball and stop it a single time.
There’s a few other tricks you’ll have to learn too, but Soko Striker introduces them to you itself fairly gradually. Many of its puzzles are simple tutorials, and the difficulty doesn’t get very high until near the end. The last puzzle will take you at least a few minutes to figure out, but I think you can probably handle it. One note that might be helpful: the scoreboard that shows you the level number looks as if it might be solid and block soccer balls, but it doesn’t. You can even walk through it! That’ll be helpful to you eventually.
Soko Striker by Axylaric (itch.io, $0)
