Sokobond Express | Review

Sokobond Express is a beautifully minimalist puzzle game that combines chemical bonds and puzzling pathfinding in novel ways. Leverage your strategic planning skills, visualizing your end destination ahead of time and adapting to the game’s growing complexities in order to maximize your opportunities for success. As the game progresses and you learn new tools and mechanics, you’ll have to experiment and consistently reconsider the space around you as your plan inevitably combusts and you must reevaluate your path forward. 

Date Played: March 2024
Time Spent: 2 – 3 hours
Number of Players: 1
Platform Played: Steam PC
Difficulty: Hard

Let’s start this review with a big ol’ caveat: I don’t enjoy sokoban games. Like, at all. There’s something about shortform, top-down, grid pattern mini levels spend pushing things around in an increasingly frustrating cycle that makes me go:

But in sokoban’s defence, I’ve never actually completed one start to finish. I think maybe I’m just not smart enough… Or to put it politely, my specific brain chemistry doesn’t quite work like *gestures vaguely* that. It could well be the sokoban genre’s best kept secret that there’s a pot of gold waiting for me right after that one level I gave up on, but I’d never know. I always hit a wall and get stuck and uninstall the game.

All that to say, Sokobond Express isn’t my usual game. It’s those dreaded four letters at the start of the title. Yet, I gave it a go because life’s too short not to and you know what? I’ve never been more pleasantly surprised to have my “sense of self” challenged. Yep, you heard that right, I actually enjoyed playing Sokobond Express.

Okay, okay, I haven’t completed it. Not yet. I haven’t uninstalled it either. I’m taking it slow and steady, dropping in to play a level or two at a time and yes, I fully intend to finish it… Eventually. It’s cute, it’s atmospheric. It’s challenging but not too challenging. Hey, it’s even educational! I’ve learned some fun facts about chemicals and committed to memory exactly what those element structures look like. Take note, Year 10 chemistry teacher!

By coating a boat’s hull in copper, you not only protect the wood from destructive shipworms, but the boat will go faster because it’s free of weeds and other hangers on.

How Does Sokobond Express Work?

Set within a minimalist white world are a number of chemical elements. They’re just there, floating around on your screen. You have one input and that’s clicking and dragging a pathway from start to finish to ‘collect’ these chemical elements into a compound. Think two Hydrogens and an Oxygen combining to H20 – or for us non Chemistry folks, water. As the game gets more difficult, more challenges are added. These include limiting the number and shape of combinations, the requirement to charge molecules with electrons before they can be used, and rotating the direction of the bonds themselves. But throughout the increasing difficulty, the game remains more or less the same. Combine elements, make things, do science.

If you get stuck along the way, there’s a handy lightbulb button on the top right hand side of each screen. This acts as a hint button, however it only shows the final shape of the finished molecule, and not the process to obtain it. In my particular playthrough this was less helpful than it could have been, but it felt in keeping with the minimalist atmosphere so I’ll forgive it.

If your frustration level is close to mine and you truly give up, there’s a sneaky button in the settings titled “unlock all levels” which… Does what it says on the tin. A nice cherry on the top for all the Mairi’s out there who may get frustrated and give up.

Interspersed with each level is a fun fact about chemistry. My knowledge of chemistry isn’t strong enough to know if the ‘fun facts’ presented were linked to the chemical chain we’d just created, but it felt interesting to learn new things at the end. A small but valuable reward for completing a level. Honestly, more games should give me fun facts on the ‘win’ or ‘loading’ screens.

One of my favourite things about the whole experience was the soundtrack. It’s pure “lofi beats to split atoms to“. Ethereal bubbly pops sound over a gentle percussion beat, going round and round in everlasting ambience. Oh to be a little molecule of Oxygen just vibing in a sea of white, waiting to be carried to another molecule to bond with a satisfying ‘bloop’…

About the Sokobond Express Team

Another interesting thing about the game, and I suppose more specifically it’s development, is that it’s kind of sort of maybe a combination of two other games. Take the original Sokobond game, and add in a sprinkle of Cosmic Express and you’ve got Sokobond Express. The game’s ancestor was originally launched as a short 6-week project titled “Subatomic Wire” developed by Jose Hernandez. It was then spotted by Alan ‘Draknek’ Hazelden who went on to collaborate with Hernandez and create the Sokobond Express you see today, published by Hazelden’s company, Draknek & Friends.

Sokobond Express: The Verdict

Sokobond Express is a simple little puzzle game with sokoban mechanics set within the wonderful world of chemical science. It’s fairly short, and perhaps more forgiving than your average game in this genre. I enjoyed the simpler puzzles, the music, and the minimalist atmosphere.

So, the real question. Do we, The Escape Roomer, recommend this game for escape room fans? Well, it’s a little hard to say. Some video games are cut and dry. Give us an escape room game like The Room, or even a point and click exploration game like Behind the Frame and we’d say “of course”, because games like that are specifically built for escape room fans. This one isn’t. In fact, it felt so different from what we normally cover (despite it being a ‘puzzle game’) that we don’t even have a category that feels remotely suitable.

And yet despite it all, I still personally enjoyed Sokobond Express. Not enough that I’m going to go out and seek out other sokoban games. No, I’m a creature of comfort and I prefer my puzzle games more, well, *nudges blog title* escape room-ey. But I enjoyed it enough that I kept playing it and, at the end, really wanted to write this review to share it.

So who would we recommend it for? Students interested in chemistry. Fans of the Youtube video series Kurzgesagt. People who listen to lofi beats all day at work. In short, just about anyone.

Sokobond Express can be played on Steam or itch.io.
We were offered a complementary key for this game, but it hasn’t affected our review.