Tag: puzzle

Catrap (1990)

Let’s start with the obvious – why the Japanese cover this time? Because for whatever reason that’s the version of the cart that I own! Near as I can tell they’re identical beyond the title – the game is as language independent as it gets. Truly box pushing has no borders.

Anyway, Catrap! The history of this one is similar to several other GB puzzle games, which is to say it’s a Game Boy port of a preexisting computer game made by another studio. The premise is, uh, weird! Our heroes (named Catboy and Catgirl) are minding their own business when they’re suddenly turned into cat people. Which means their names are just…that? Already? Regardless, our heroes are so motivated to de-cat themselves that they beat the everloving shit out of several Spirit Halloweens’ worth of spookingtons to do it, and somehow that solves the problem! Fuck yeah! Violence wins!

The Sokoban comparison is obvious and certainly not invalid, but Catrap feels meaningfully distinct for several reasons. It’s got gravity, for one! You still move and push on a grid but it resembles a platformer, only you can’t jump. The vast majority of the puzzles involve finding ways to push and drop boxes into the right spots so you can bump into an enemy, at which points you’ll punch their lights out with an animation I never got tired of. Beat down all the baddies in the level and you win! Simple as.

By far this game’s most standout design feature is its phenomenal undo/redo function. Since all you need to play is a dpad, A and B are committed to undoing as many steps as you’d like and redoing just as many if you rewound too far. I cannot adequately emphasize how much better the experience of solving these puzzles is made for this inclusion. I’m very much an experimenter, someone who likes to visualize by touching the thing, which older Sokobans typically punish by forcing a full restart. You may recall that Boxxle, cursed be its name, allowed you to take a whole 1 step back! Catrap is almost shockingly generous for a game of its era, providing considerable quality of life without compromising its challenge in any way. It predates a lot of other time-rewind-type games, yet I’d argue Catrap handles it better than several far newer titles!

I haven’t even gotten to some of the game’s more ambitious qualities! A bunch of levels feature both characters and have you switch which one you’re controlling, effectively turning the other one into a block (and also swapping between their two different music tracks, which is a nice touch). There are a lot of creative uses for this freeze’n’swap and I found those puzzles to be by far the trickiest to get my head around. It also has an entire level editor, and the manual goes so far as to include even more than the base 100 if you just can’t get enough ghostbusting. That’s a lot of game for your 90’s dollar, especially this early in the console’s life!

Turns out I am absolutely down to shove boxes for 100 levels if my time is respected and I get to concuss a mummy. I cannot adequately explain nor justify why the objective being “I want to punch that ghost in its stupid face” motivated me so much more strongly than box reorganization. Maybe that’s explanation enough? Regardless, this is a welcome deviation from traditional Sokoban while still offering the same level of satisfaction you’d expect from its crunchy 100-step puzzles, and it’s aged like a fine catwine. If this never came out back in the day and dropped on Itch.io tomorrow the puzzle sickos would still be feasting.

4/5

03/15/2026
Dexterity (1990)

In the How to Play section of Dexterity’s manual SNK calls this a “jigsaw puzzle, maze, and labyrinth game“. That’s a pretty unhelpful description, so I’ll give you mine: Dexterity is a Fucker Game. For the unfamiliar, FUCKER GAME, DEFINED: “a game that involuntarily makes you call it a Fucker frequently and with increasing intensity.” Alumni of Fucker Game University are not necessarily bad, but they are typically frustrating, obnoxious, or both. Dexterity just happens to be all of the above! FGU! FGU!

I would love to tell you what Dexterity is about, but SNK didn’t manage to figure that out before manufacturing the cart labels. In Japan it was called “Funny Field” which still doesn’t explain why this little boy is trapped in a series of increasingly horrible grids. The manual’s story page ends on “So find the magical key to unlock the door to not only Dexter’s but your own wonderful imagination!”. I tried, but a beetle sat on the key until I died of exposure.

The goal of the game is to flip all the floor tiles to their other color before the timer runs out. This works similarly to Reversi, by which I mean if you flip a tile and there’s another flipped tile in the same row or column, it’ll flip every tile in-between to the same color. Please don’t get the impression that this is a cerebral, abstract affair. The game’s called Dexterity, y’know? It isn’t as much of a puzzle game as it is a real time scramble with enemies that’ll unflip your tiles, forcing you to double back to fix them. At first this is fairly simple to the point of being a bit dull, but eventually the stages transition to a particularly shitty maze game filled with enemies that hate the board, hate you, but most of all, hate predictable behavior.

Games like this always involve variance but Dexterity’s luck factor is way out of whack. Enemies may or may not bother to flip tiles in any given direction or at any given time. Their movement styles are predictable in that some are slow, some are fast, some tend to turn, etc., but what they actually do is known only to them and god. If I voiced my opinion of that goddamn snowman I would get in trouble. This is exacerbated by the powerups. These range from giving you a few worthless points to all but winning you the level, but what you get is mostly random as far as I can tell, beyond the good ones being rarer. Because of course they are. Most of the time you’re playing from behind, trying to play Reversi uphill despite Wesley Snipes’ warnings, but it’s just as unsatisfying when the game occasionally just throws you a win for free!

I was so convinced that this game was fucking with me that I swapped to a save state-capable device and started testing. Some of the enemies pretty much always do the same thing, and you can semi-reliably route some sections, but as I reran annoying levels again and again I noticed irregularities. Sometimes the enemies did practically nothing, other times they would go so far as to hold chokepoints and just refuse to move, wasting upwards of 10 seconds or getting me killed outright. Success isn’t earned in Dexterity, it’s eventually granted.

Even the bonus game is borderline random! At first it looks like it’s just a memorization challenge, flashing a bunch of tiles on an otherwise empty board that you need to remember and flip, except one of them is secretly a skull that’ll kick you out with no extra life to your name. I think these patterns are preset and if you memorize the placements you’ll be able to 100% them, but that’s a level of time-sadism I simply do not possess, says the guy who’s playing all of these.

By the time you manage to hold onto your continues long enough to get to the end you’re confronted by King Tojo, a bigass ghost boss who’s basically from a different video game with mechanics to match. The fight involves picking up and throwing enemies, a mechanic that doesn’t exist until then, meaning if you don’t immediately get the hang of it and successfully land the dozen or however many hits Tojo demands there’s a very real chance you have to play the entire video game over again. Did you know this game’s Nintendo-assigned designation is DMG-FU-USA? You cannot make this shit up! They know what they did!

I like the jaunty little tunes. I guess. Half a point for those. Fucker.

1.5/5

02/25/2026
Boxxle (1989)

Can we address the homunculus in the room first? I hate looking at the cover of Boxxle so much it’s unreal. No one has ever been so face-warpingly overjoyed to be pushing boxes. Blink twice if you’re being exploited, man!

It is time to introduce The Sokoban Clause. The Game Boy’s library is chock full of these damn things, especially early in its life, and I have a horrible Sokoban allergy that’ll see me breaking out in hives if I play them for too long. That’s not to say I’m incapable of enjoying it or its offshoots (as we’ll see in later entries), but I generally prefer it as part of a larger design as opposed to pure unadulterated crate pushing. Going forward, massive Sokoban collections like this are going to necessitate some degree of level skippery, generally by way of passwords. I still intend to beat most of any given crate-shover for the purpose of thoroughness, but I can only shove so much crate before the splinters make it hard to type.

And boy, Boxxle really offers nothing else to enjoy beyond manual labor. Aside from the cute little arcade game-esque interludes every 10 levels there are no ideas beyond “get back to work, asshole”. You don’t push different boxes. The levels are never anything but brick warehouses filled with wooden crates – the literal only thing that might surprise you is how the game zooms out to a smaller sprite set for big levels so you can still see the entire board. There are no obstacles beyond walls. It’s the same thing 108 times. The background music never even changes from the same 26 second loop! Yes it’s a whole 26 seconds, I counted. Because I had nothing else to think about.

There are some considerations taken that make Boxxle marginally more tolerable than earlier Sokoban riffs. Restarts are quick. There is technically an undo button, though don’t give them too much credit as it only works for a single step. Anyone who’s played enough of these will tell you that you’re most likely to realize you botched your 100 step plan back at step 49 upon reaching step 78. Concluding our positives, there’s an incredibly crusty “YEAH” voice sample upon completion of each level that would make an excellent addition to any soundboard.

You want proof that this game is too much of a bland thing? I used a YouTube playthrough to source my passwords because I don’t trust search engines or the internet at large anymore, and cheat sites were never reliable in the first place. After nearly passing out from exhaustion in world 5 I decided to skip a couple levels. Apparently the game’s fatiguing influence doesn’t just affect me, because after the post-world interlude the video includes 4 minutes of literally nothing. No menuing, no input, just a union-mandated 4 minutes of rest before mustering the spirit to continue on. The music kicks back in, the next level starts, and our hero just kind of sits there for a moment longer, contemplating quitting at the halfway point before eventually getting back to the grind. And despite that, this video is still the only valid speedrun I could find that wasn’t a TAS! Not even speedrunners want to touch this! Do you know how soul-sucking a game has to be to have a single run go unchallenged for nine years?

This game’s credits end on the words “SEE YOU AGAIN” on an otherwise blank screen. I consider this to be a targeted threat, and if it wasn’t for this project I would be beyond excited to tell it no. Alas, Boxxle has a direct sequel and we are far, far away from escaping Sokoban’s gravitational pull on this system. Next time I talk about one of these it’ll be an example of how to do them right!

1.5/5 vile demons in human guises sentenced to box pushing for their crimes

01/26/2026