Boxyboy

Boxyboy is the North American name for Sōkoban World, a 1990 PC Engine HuCard puzzle game. Thinking Rabbit, the company behind the original Sōkoban, developed the game with Media Rings credited on the Japanese release; NEC published Boxyboy for TurboGrafx-16.

It turns the warehouse-keeper idea into a top-down series of rooms filled with crates, walls, and marked storage squares. The sole objective is to place every crate on a marked square. A stage ends only when all of its targets are covered.

The rules make each compact board a planning problem. The player walks in four directions and can push one crate at a time, but can never pull a crate or move through it. Sending a box into an unusable corner, blocking a passage, or leaving no side from which to make the next push can make a puzzle impossible to finish.

This version contains 250 puzzles, drawing on the established Sōkoban formula while presenting a large dedicated set for the console. The stages are arranged around a light travel theme, with country scenes appearing between groups of levels, and their difficulty comes from finding a workable order for every push rather than from speed or enemies.

Its controls support deliberate trial and error. One button makes the character walk faster when no crate is being pushed, while the other takes back moves; the menu also offers a full-board map, a retry option, a return to the level selector, and a sound toggle. The selector lets players revisit cleared material and move through unlocked stages.

Progress is supported by passwords: finishing stages 100, 200, and 250 awards passwords for the following section. That structure makes the long puzzle sequence more manageable while preserving the central challenge of avoiding deadlocks before they occur.

Boxyboy also includes a construction mode for making original Sōkoban boards. Players choose from five tile types, place or replace pieces on a grid, test a creation, and save custom puzzles in one of three slots. The editor makes the game more than a fixed tour of prepared boards, inviting players to build their own box-pushing problems.