Rejected Hero

Rejected Hero is a free sokoban game about a necromancer controlling the dead. Tombstones can be turned into zombies, and all zombies share simultaneous movement. The puzzles are very tight and quite tricky.

The introduction text of Rejected Hero, and even more so its puzzle design, seem to position it as a lost expansion to Jonah Ostroff’s Heroes of Sokoban trilogy. This series of block-manipulating games came out just a few weeks after PuzzleScript was released, back in 2013, and it showcased how versatile and useful this compact puzzle programming language was. The Heroes of Sokoban series later served as one of the main foundations for developing Order of the Sinking Star.

Contrary to the original Heroes who banded together in various levels, the titular character of Rejected Hero is shunned by their peers and has to deal with the puzzle rooms on their own. Admittedly, their special ability isn’t quite reputable: they’re a necromancer who can turn tombstones into (actionable) corpses. When a corpse is pushed, all corpses in the screen move the same way. It's a kind of distant, fiddly control that plays like a twisted version of the Bard's ability in Heroes of Sokoban III: The Bard and the Druid.

The puzzle design is very tight, with rooms so condensed that, even when you get into a dead end, you know that the satisfaction of clearing the level is only a few different moves away.

This description was written by Oriane Tury.