Magicube

Magicube is a sokoban puzzle-platformer about a wizard seeking a treasure across cramped dungeon cells. With only bare movement options and the ability to create one cube at a time, the game crafts ingenious levels of surprising difficulty. It is a prime example of refined puzzle design that should baffle and dazzle even the most experienced players.

You can only do a few things in a Magicube level: move sideways, make small jumps, and push blocks around. Although your character has free (if limited) 2D movement, the blocks and obstacles in a room are actually positioned on a grid. And your jump is just high enough to climb one block at a time. That’s the extent of platforming in the game, and there’s close to no skill required. You can even rewind the room to a previous state with as many undos as you want.

Aside from the movement options, your character also wields a magicube spell. You can throw the spell left or right in a straight line, until it hits an obstacle and turns into a block. There can only be one magicube at a time, and it will disappear as soon as you cast the spell somewhere else. Each level contains a special pedestal; in order to clear the level, you’ll have to find a way to land a magicube right on top of the pedestal.

The game features a collection of 40+ extremely tight puzzles that often barely have anything in them to work with. And yet they manage to be consistently perplexing. Even though new mechanics are introduced as you progress (such as blocks appearing only when a pressure plate is activated), the puzzles remain compact and refined, with no filler levels whatsoever.

Magicube shines the most in the contrast between its bare-bones system and its extreme difficulty, a feeling further reinforced by the stark PICO-8 visuals. Beneath its apparent simplicity lies an extremely well-crafted and difficult puzzle game. Just like the magicube spawning from thin air, Magicube offers hard challenges using next to nothing.

This description was written by Andréas Andrieux.