Pajama Sam's Sock Works

Говорят, если дойти до 100 уровня, можно познать секреты носочного искусства

Маленькая аркада про сортировку носков, трубы и легкий детский хаос. Не квест, а простая мини-игра. На полчаса нормально, ждать полноценного Pajama Sam не надо.

In 1997, my 7-year old self had my mind blown by one of the best puzzle games of my entire life. This game comes from Humongous Entertainment, creators of other bangers such as Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, and Spy Fox. The premise: Pajama Sam's mom has asked him to sort the socks - a task so very boring that he falls asleep and dream of fantastic sock-sorting machines. Ironically, after a sprint of playing SockWorks, you will also dream of sock-sorting machines thanks to the "Tetris Effect" (you've experienced this - look it up on Wikipedia). I beat the game in 1 day, but that night my neurons continued to sort socks against my will. My dreams, just like Pajama Sam's, were filled with a tangle of red and blue conveyor belts. Pajama Sam spends his precious REM sleep controlling intricate mechanisms with conveyor belts, gates, paint buckets, and chutes to ensure each sock ends up in the corresponding colored basket. The first levels start out super-easy to teach you how to play, and the difficulty ramps up gradually from there. The fun doesn't end when you've beaten all 100 levels - the sandbox allows you to challenge your loved ones with nightmares of your own design! From age 10 to 34, the SockWorks soundtrack lived only in my memory. Upon playing the game again after a 24 year gap, I was delighted to find that the soundtrack still slaps.

This is my 3-year-old review of the game apparently "gjfubhjkgu mmjtr6kio8k76uyi6kijhlbgkok,kjhuhjulktflmtgkv,mcmjoifjkgvj mbjv;.bd./.l/;/65652090fiuhmjtgsmnjbhng njbbhjgjmnvmjhvm, " as he loves playing it, I will take this as a high recommendation.

I played this a lot as a kid and I remember it being fun...until you got to the later levels. I mean, don't get me wrong, it is still fun in a general sense, and I do still recommend the game. Actually, I [i]really[/i] recommend the game for kids especially given the logic skills it teaches and reinforces. That said, the reason I say the later levels are less fun is two-fold. For one, you can occasionally get stuck in a situation where socks overlap, but you need to separate them. Kind of annoying and can make you have to restart. The other issue is that, as the levels get more complex, you end up bouncing around to a degree that would really test a kid's (or adult's) patience and hand-eye-coordination skills. Honestly, that patience bit was what ironically kept me playing this game as a kid since I just could not do this in one sitting. Even with the faster speed setting, it would take too long. It didn't help that setting it to a higher speed was just not a good idea in certain levels, so you had to play them at the turtle's pace. Overall, though, these are minor quibbles. The game is still interesting and it introduces neat mechanics that you have to account for. There's actually a very similar game to this presented as a mini game in Let's Explore the Airport (Junior Field Trips), another title from Humongous Entertainment...and by "very similar" I pretty much mean "basically the same." If you happen to have both titles, you can certainly go and compare the two if you are interested. The difference is mostly just in the levels and the presence of Sam here in Sock Works. Btw...does Sam not actually know what automation is? We're controlling Sam, who is controlling the belts, etc. That's not "doing it for him." He's doing it, just with a machine. Maybe he's just referring to the folding part, not the sorted part...ehh ok. Honestly, I try not to pay too much attention to what Sam says during this game because, well, that's not the Sam voice I know and it bugs me. The voice actor did a good job, and I'm not saying otherwise. I'm just too used too accustomed to Pamela Adlon's performance, and that voice is Sam's voice to my ears. E. G. Daily does a fine job, like I said. It just makes Sam sound like he's under the weather or something....which is actually kind of fitting considering what this game foreshadows is regards to the next, proper Pajama Sam title. Anyways, I recommend picking up Sock Works on sale via the Pajama Sam Complete Pack or the Humongous Entertainment Complete Pack.

By far the best HE Junior arcade game, it is still a little easy But that is to be expected, this game was made for kids.

Гра дитинства. Обожнюю.

While I have basically a glowing opinion of many of the other Humongous titles, this one is a little iffy. By the way, I am gonna assume most people who played this, didn't care to sit there and play all 100 levels. But I did. I played all of them. So it's a puzzle game, ostensibly made for kids. While the first few stages are not too difficult, and they do the basic sort of thing a lot of games do where they have a few stages that just exist to show you what all the parts do one by one, this game I think gets started very quickly with just throwing every single mechanic at you, and that's not such a great experience. I will say though, even though there's 100 stages, I never really got bored or felt like I was just doing the same thing over and over. You need to put the right colored sock in the right basket. The socks always are moving, either on conveyor belts or on chutes like you'd see at the airport (this game was built out of a minigame for an airport game Humongous made) so unless you can get the sock stuck somewhere between two belts, or confined somehow, you are ALWAYS juggling socks and this is where much of the difficulty comes in, because there are many stages later on where you might need to keep an eye on 2, 3 or even 4 socks all at once in every corner of the screen and their direction. In my opinion, the game is probably way, way, way too hard for the ages this game seems to be aimed at. Because, while you might look at it and go 'oh well how hard can it be' and the first few stages are just free, like you don't even have to do anything, once you hit level 20 or so, the gloves are off and the rest of the stages generally required me to pause the game just to see what was going on before actually planning out routes for all the socks to get where they needed to go. There were some stages that required me to actually try multiple times, and one stage in particular (level 85) is just evil. The game has some problems with its design. For instance, chutes can output socks pretty much in any direction, which... I think was probably not intended by the devs, not explained to the people designing levels, and some levels probably had to be patched up during testing or something like that hastily and weren't just ripped out or redone or anything, which is a shame. It does, however, make some levels like 85 significantly harder than they otherwise should be. This also means that it's RNG sometimes whether or not a sock goes down the right chute, if there are multiple copies of that chute on the stage. For instance, there's 5 chutes labelled with a 'star' so, if a red sock goes down it, the sock could come out from any of the other 4 chutes. This was however used to great effect on some stages to basically confuse the everloving daylights out of the player, so clearly some level designers knew about it and made use of it, and some didn't. It seems very apparent to me that this is the case, anyway. I'm just going to label the conveyor belts, the chutes, the weird flippers and other puzzle elements collectively as 'blocks' here. I think that the variety of blocks is good. I think that there's enough variety there without it being too many to remember how to deal with each one, or too few. I think though, that the game might have been better off if broken into chapters, with each one sort of bringing in one block that starts off very simple, and then is expanded on and done more and more advanced until you get to the last one which is a big challenge with advanced concepts for that block. Then you could start again with another block, and go like that, including older mechanics until you get to the last chapter or few chapters which then start using everything together. This might have been more kid-friendly too. As it is, I would suggest you keep children far away from this because this reminded me of Factorio more than anything. With the arrows scrolling on conveyor belt, blue belts, red belts, even the weird spring machines that kinda look like a splitter or something, yeah, I weirdly felt like I was trying to route belts in Factorio. Anyway, I think I still would recommend it, but only barely. The concept is interesting, the execution is so-so, but I still managed to beat it and it didn't really feel like a chore, I did actively want to keep playing and I enjoyed seeing just how far the game went, and the fact that it kept challenging me actually did keep me engaged even though there were one or two frustrating levels in there.

Honestly? Probably the best spinoff that Humongous Entertainment has made in their Junior Arcade lineup of games. It's a simple get object from point a to point b style of puzzle, but it does it's job well at training kids to be good at puzzles and teaching them hand eye coordination, timing, and patience. Despite really enjoying this game(and I highly recommend you play/buy it, even if you don't want to play/buy other Pajama Sam games due to it's genre or target audience, it genuinely feels fun to play as an adult), this game does have flaws. Like most Junior Arcade games, the difficulty isn't consistent curve upward, it jumps all over the place, especially here, sure earlier levels are usually easier ones but later levels have a lot of hard levels that make you question why you struggle in a kid's game, only to give you level even easier than previous 10 levels xD Speaking of difficulty, some levels are, genuinely tough, 15,24,27,40,66,69,72,73(probably one of the biggest difficulty spikes), 82,84, 88, 94, 96, 99 and weirdly enough, 100 level was actually relatively easy compared to previous Junior Arcade last levels. I view it as a good thing, and it helps game age well(I would have lovez to have played this game as a kid, only to 100% ace it now with relative ease) but I'm not sure how many people share my opinion, some people prefer games that are fully casual, fully hardcore or has hard moments and it puts them around easy stuff as a breeze, and this game belongs to the 3rd category. Lastly, this game has level editor, didn't mention it in other Junior Arcade game reviews, but here, the level editor would've been great if only it had online feature/steam workshop So yeah, if you like niche puzzle games that are relatively easy but with some surprising hard moments(well, a few minutes of thinking kinda hard), then I highly recommend you to play this one!

Decent enough puzzle game, but I can't really recommend it to anyone other than like DIE HARD Pajama Sam fans. The physics are just too weird and the amount of times I lost due to luck or needing super quick reaction times was too high. Still better than the Freddi Fish arcade games.