Game settings

The four difficulty modes

Difficulty here is not tuned by adding walls or taking away moves. It is tuned by taking away information. All four modes show the same grid and the same word: what changes is how much the game is willing to tell you.

Discovery

Letters are visible on the crates and on the targets. The grid reads completely: you know which crate goes where, and all that remains is working out how.

This is the pure movement problem — traditional Sokoban plus an imposed order. It suits learning grid shapes, spotting dead squares and building the habit of planning before pushing. Nothing is hidden, so nothing is guessed: a mistake here is always a mistake of planning, never a lack of information.

Scout

The crates carry their letters, but the targets are blank. You still know the word; the row of targets simply no longer tells you which position belongs to which letter.

The deduction required is light but genuine: you have to reconstruct the order of the word across the row, left to right, before deciding what to push where. On a four-letter word this is immediate; on eight, it forces you to hold the order in your head throughout the solve, which changes how you reason.

Investigator

The reverse situation: the targets are labelled, the crates are not. A crate only reveals its letter once it is correctly placed.

This is the most disorienting mode at first, because it removes the piece of information you think you need most. In practice it shifts the reasoning: since you do not know what each crate carries, you cannot plan crate by crate. You plan position by position — which crate can reach this target without stranding the others — and let the letters reveal themselves along the way. The method that works is elimination, starting with the crates that have only one reachable destination.

Oracle

Nothing is labelled: not the crates, not the targets. Only the word is known.

All the available information is then geometric. Solving becomes a compatibility problem: which assignments of crates to targets are feasible given the walls, the corridors and the order of the word. Many grids admit only one workable assignment, and finding it amounts to solving the grid before playing it.

This is the most demanding mode, and the one where the opening survey stops being advice and becomes a requirement.

How to choose

The mode set in the options applies when a level opens. You can still change it mid-game without altering that default: trying a grid in Oracle and dropping back to Discovery when it resists costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

The most effective progression is not to climb as fast as possible. It is to change one variable at a time. Going from Discovery to Scout adds the reconstruction of the order; going from Scout to Investigator swaps that skill for another one, elimination. Jumping straight from Discovery to Oracle means facing both at once, which makes any failure hard to interpret: you no longer know whether the movement plan or the letter reading was at fault.

Mode difficulty and grid difficulty

These four modes do not modify the grids. A given grid is the same in every mode: same walls, same word, same optimal solution. A grid's intrinsic difficulty comes from something else — word length, the number of pushes required, how narrow the passages are — and rises independently across the chapters of Adventure.

The two scales combine. A short grid in Oracle and a long grid in Discovery can demand comparable effort, for entirely different reasons: the first requires deduction, the second requires planning. Varying both is what covers everything the game has to offer.