NetHack from aaaa to Zruty Ep. 5: Sokoban and cream pies

In this episode: Jeremy introduces Wes to the puzzle solving area of NetHack: Sokoban! We dive deeper into Sokoban in another later episode, but this one offers an overview and history of Sokoban puzzles. Wes also makes another new discovery: cream pies that can be used as weapons.

NetHack from aaaa to Zruty is our newest Let's Play series. I'm diving into the end-all-be-all of roguelikes, a game you may have heard of but probably haven't played. NetHack has been around since 1987 as a descendant of Rogue, which a few games have taken inspiration from since then. But where Rogue was a simple game that was expanded on in Hack and NetHack, NetHack hasn't spawned its own sequel: it's simply grown and grown and grown in complexity for nearly 30 years.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).