Help me remember the name of an old DOS block pusher puzzle game

June 8, 2014 6:37 AM

I'm sure there are many games like this, but I can't find anything at all similar to the one I'm thinking of. It was a "block pusher" (I'm not sure what else to call it, the sort of game where you solve a puzzle like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban). I played it on DOS when I was a kid. I believe the game was set in a dungeon, or at least stone featured heavily. There were various enemies, and you would push around blocks to get through the puzzle while defending yourself from the enemies. Can anyone think of any specific games like this? It would have been released by 1996 or so at the latest.
posted by jrsnr to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

It says in the wiki article you linked that those sorts of games are called transport puzzles, and then links to a list of them; your game may be among those. Anything else you can recall about it would help narrow it down a bit....
posted by the webmistress at 7:14 AM on June 8, 2014

Best answer: Paganitzu.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:11 AM on June 8, 2014

Boulder Dash?
posted by EKStickland at 8:44 AM on June 8, 2014

I played Chip's Challenge pretty obsessively around that time... not sure it quite fits your description though.
posted by eleutheria at 9:15 AM on June 8, 2014

I would say Chips challenge or Rodents revenge.. A wikipedia search will show some screenshots :)
posted by tahu363 at 9:16 AM on June 8, 2014

Rodent's Revenge is the one I thought of initially but I definitely played that on an early version of Windows. It did feature a lot of grey though.
posted by Night_owl at 9:20 AM on June 8, 2014

NetHack had a set of Sokoban levels. In general the game is an ascii dungeon, and you're fighting your way down - work through a mapped level, fighting monsters and finding tools/magic stuff, until you find a staircase down to the next level. But as well as the main dungeon path, there's an extra branch down though some mines, and an extra branch from lvl 10 o so back up to lvl 5 that's all Sokoban, where your character ("@") is pushing boulders around to clear a path.
posted by aimedwander at 9:22 AM on June 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I believe it was Paganitzu.

So I'm changing the question. What is the best version of this type of game to play today?
posted by jrsnr at 10:16 AM on June 8, 2014

If you have an iPad, there's a lot of Sokoban-style games for it. My favourite is CLARC, though I've been stuck on one level for a while.
posted by Georgina at 5:24 PM on June 8, 2014