I'm sure everyone reading this blog knows of Sokoban or Boxxle or one of the other names of the ancient shoving boxes onto certain spots-type of puzzle game. Flash Motor Karen plays kind of like a more complicated, but simultaneously more forgiving version of those games.
Each stage is a small area with a switch and a door. The object is to press the switch, then get to the door. You can take as many steps as you like getting to the switch, but each stage has a limit on how many steps can be taken between pressing the switch and getting to the door. So, in puzzle mode at least, there are two main kinds of stages: ones which introduce the player to a new concept, in which the puzzle to solve is usually getting to the switch, allowing the player more leeway in learning how to interact with the new element, and the main kind, in which the player is given
elements they have seen before, and the main challenge of the stage is to set up a path to get from the switch to the door in as few moves as possible.
There's also a story mode, chapters of which are gradually unlocked as you make your way through puzzle mode, which, as well as telling a story (entirely in Japanese, of course, and thankfully skippable), also adds another type of stage. The third type of stage has enemy robots walking around the map, who act in a roguelike-style manner, only moving when the player moves. In these stages, the aim is to "trick" the robots into moving into a square adjacent to your own, so they can be dispatched with a press of the O button. Conversley, moving into a square adjacent to one of the robots will result in the player's death.
Flash Motor Karen is a pretty good game, and unlike many puzzle games of this type, never feels impossibly hard (though there are hard puzzles, I've yet to be stuck on one for more than 10-15 minutes, nor did I ever feel that the solution was totally beyond my reach). Though this might mean that the game is offensively easy for hardened sokoban fans. (Sokofans?)
Wow, looks like this could be great fun.
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