The UFO 50 Diaries: Block Koala

Soko-belter!

Look, dear reader, I hope that over the years I have established within you a realistic impression of my gaming prowess. I’m not a smart man, I just like to use smart words. I struggle with things others find second nature. I love challenging games, but so often I find myself humbled by even the lightest of them.

So believe me when I say the sense of achievement that comes from not only finally beating a game in this collection but also Red Cherrying it as well? Check this shit out:

Sokoban is a genre of puzzle games with a weirdly divisive reception. A series of spatial reasoning and sequence puzzles that tax you to push the right blocks in the right order, their highs and lows are well documented by critics and designers alike, but there's a surprising amount of variety to be found within that genre.

Titles like Void Stranger, Bonfire Peaks and last year's Ultra Nothing (which I’m currently playing) couldn't be further apart in presentation or design, showcasing that the nomenclature is little more than a baseline for some other form of creativity. Throw Baba is You into the mix and you're away to the races!

In the context of the modern era Block Koala does feel surprisingly unevolved, bar the UFO 50 obfuscation of rules shenanigans of course. It's just a block-push puzzler. Yes, the rules branch out across its fifty levels and there is some rising complexity to be found there, but in that same bundle of thoughts, you could remove the cheerful visuals, the narrative conceit, the chirpy theme tune, and be left with essentially the same game.

As such it does make sense that this is not going to be a firm favorite for most discerning UFO 50 connoisseurs. But I liked it.

I liked it enough to meet the red cherry condition for completing all 50 levels.

In many ways one of the key skills a player must inhabit in order to drill down to the core of what makes this collection tick is that there is a kayfabe to be upheld.

Block Koala, made somewhere between 2016 and 2024, was ‘officially’ released in 1985, 20+ years before a lot of the previously mentioned genre gems were even concieved. And in that context, it being largely just what it is feels less a detriment and more an exercise in paired down game design.

In this regard, I found it to be a delight. A game that unfurls the more you play into this network of instantly clockable rules and tools for navigating its myriad conundrums. I sank nearly ten hours into it.

It is that ‘figure things out for yourself’ thing that makes Block Koala so compelling an experience. You're given ample space to experiment, as it is generous in its undo mechanics. Many of the early puzzles demonstrate that not everything on the map needs to be altered in order to reach your goal.

The moving parts have multiple roles within this ecosystem and that's a really clever aid to this process of finding your feet and experimenting with the rules of the game. It means that even in failure you can build up knowledge that might aid you with future puzzles.

Block Koala isn't unusual enough to be worthy of discussion outside of its puzzle design. The world map is very pleasing in how it opens up, offering you plenty of options in case you're bashing your head against a particular level.

You don't need to complete every puzzle to finish the game, but you need to do enough that going the final stretch isn't so much of an ordeal. There’s enough slack there that you can simply abandon a chunk of the puzzles if you're getting frustrated.

Case in point for my time with the game: Of the 50 puzzles on offer, I completed around 44 of them without any assistance at all from our handsome friends on the internet. That might speak to the relative ease of the game, or that I really gelled with what it asked of me, but either way it was a cognitive ego boost I really needed because that other Sokoban I mentioned I was playing, Ultra Nothing? That game is bloody difficult!

I’m not going to fawn over this game. Obviously it's going to have a place in my heart for being the first game in the collection I actually completed, but it's surprisingly unsurprising and that, I think, will end up being a black mark against it in the long run.

Just in these past few weeks I've played Samurai volleyball, prehistoric strategy, an incredible, electrifying platformer with a messed up control scheme, and (spoiler for next week's game) a ludonarratively harmonious stealth puzzler.

Of course by comparison Block Koala seems a bit juvenile and flat, but sometimes you just need to push some boxes around. And have it be just that.