Thanks to QUByte for the review code

Title: Reason: Casual Puzzle
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $0.99
Release Date: 08/13/2020

Presentation

This puzzler is a Sokoban title, meaning that once again, you’re pushing blocks all around. So you don’t really need much visual flair for a title like this, but they definitely did the bare minimum with Reason: the presentation is this ugly, 3D look, and the game starts off with this pretty terrible comic that makes no sense before you are thrust into the first stage of the game. The music is generic, the look is generic… Reason doesn’t really try to look good.

Gameplay

Reason is Sokoban, literally, just Sokoban. As mentioned in my Box Land review, these types of games are defined by tasking the player to push and or pull blocks around to fit into slots in order to move onto the next stage. Rinse and repeat, and that’s exactly what Reason makes you do.

Control a robot, move towards a block, and push it around until it fits into a glowing hole. Do that with all blocks in a stage and move onto the next, until all fifty stages are complete. That’s literally, absolutely everything to do in this game, and the stages aren’t too terribly interesting either. The controls are fine, the movement is fairly quick, and you can quickly retry the stage with a press of the minus button, but besides that there’s literally nothing this game does that I could mark as new, special, cool or worthwhile.

Like the robot you pilot through this block pushing adventure, this game is hollow and plain, with this only being a basic outlet to provide block puzzles with nothing else going for it. Granted, you can replay a cleared stage to try and best your move count and time, but there’s no leaderboards of any kind so there’s pretty much no reason to. And it’s not like the puzzles are badly planned, since the game does get tricky rather fast, and it does feel like a satisfying moment when you finally nail a tough puzzle. (as long as you don’t accidentally push the final block off a cliff while celebrating) But there really isn’t much to this game besides just block pushing, and basic block pushing at that.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Reason is a Sokoban game… That does the absolute bare minimum. The puzzles are fine, the game controls OK, but at the end of the day, that’s all that Reason provides. There’s no charm, no clever twist, no good looking visuals or assets, no good music, nothing of interest beside block pushing with a cute robot for fifty levels, in a format that you’ve probably done before. If you like these kinds of games, it works OK for more content of this type, but considering how there have been other Sokoban-likes on the eShop already, I just suggest you buy a prettier one like Box Land Demake instead, even though this is easily one of the more affordable takes on the genre, being only a dollar.

I give Reason: Casual Puzzle a 4 out of 10.