Pushing boxes around a warehouse isn’t just the pastime of the expensive robots working for Amazon, it’s also what Sokoban enthusiasts enjoy doing too. There are quite a few variations of this puzzle concept, like SokoBunny where you’re in control of a bunny kicking boxes around. But what if the boxes were cartons of milk instead, and you had to help a cat fill his bowls up?
Well, that’s Fluffy Milo in a nutshell and it’s here to take you on a puzzling adventure that aims to deliver fun for the whole family.
Fluffy Milo is centred on a very strange looking cat named Milo who is shaped like a block cube. He’s quite hungry and so is in need of your help to fill up his bowl using a carton of milk. Played out from a bird’s eye view perspective, the idea is to move Milo around an arrangement of tiles – using the analog stick – in order to push the carton into the bowl tile. That really is all there is to Fluffy Milo initially, with such simplicity meaning it’s easy to pick up and anyone has the opportunity to succeed.
There are sixty levels in total and you won’t just be shoving a single carton all the time. I mean, it’d be a real drag if nothing changed throughout the adventure. Fortunately, the difficulty escalates steadily as you progress and this adds variety to proceedings in two main ways.
The first method is by slowly increasing the amount of cartons and bowls, ensuring you have to logically work out the best route for each carton, before making any rash moves. Considering the number of cartons eventually reaches ten, you really must think a few steps ahead.
The other change sees the layout of tiles grow bigger and more complex, with tiles also missing in places. If there’s no tile, then Milo cannot traverse it nor push a carton into that particular spot. This causes situations where certain cartons can only be manoeuvred along a specific route and that actually helps make sense of their ideal final destinations.
My one real issue is that it’s occasionally tricky to know whether a tile is there or not, because the autumn environment is similarly coloured to the tiles themselves. It caught me out a couple of times through not realising there’s a missing piece, leading to some erroneous moves.
There’s an option to undo up to three moves at once if you do make a small mistake, which is definitely possible in the middle to latter stages. Sometimes that’s not enough leeway though and resetting the entire level is necessary instead. It’s a good job that the solutions are never overly tough, otherwise frustration would surely arise. Completing a level doesn’t take long either, so retrying isn’t time consuming at all.
That does however mean you can have all sixty levels of Fluffy Milo wrapped up in around an hour, which is a tad short even considering the budget price. I do feel it could benefit from a few more mechanics to keep the experience fresh in its entirety, or potentially lengthen it with optional bonus levels with increased difficulty for those wanting a challenge.
In terms of visuals, there’s a charming aesthetic to Fluffy Milo and the seasonal environments are nice enough as backdrops. Every fifteen levels it changes to a different season, breaking up any potential monotony on the eyes. What you see here is not going to wow you, nor is the non-intrusive BGM going to be something you long to hear outside of the game, but combined they do a decent job of creating a chilled atmosphere.
Overall then, Fluffy Milo delivers a wholesome Sokoban puzzler that’s easy enough for most to get to grips with. The difficulty curve is absolutely spot on and you’ll seldom feel any puzzle is beyond solving as long as it’s approached logically. It could do with being a bit longer, perhaps introducing a couple of additional mechanics for some more variety, but for the price you can’t moan too much.
Fluffy Milo is a good puzzler and you could do a lot worse than to satisfy this very hungry kitty’s cravings.
