Endure The Swarm pits your sokoban skills against endless, horrible insects

Endure The Swarm, which launches on Friday 8th December, takes that most abstract and respectable of game genres, the block-pushing puzzler, and fills it with ghastly, flesh-eating insects. There’s no amount of pesticide that can stay this tide, nor (sadly) is there the option to stand on a chair screaming and waving a broom. Rather, you must call upon your mammalian mastery of spatial reasoning to survive. The insect hivemind, you see, is incapable of grasping the complexities of block positioning.

Story: the world has fallen to the bugs and you are the last survivor – no Action Man, but an apathetic contract worker who starts the game in bed, surfing Wikipedia and dosing himself up with Diet Soda. Some introductory dialogue: "Before it all happened, I was surrounded by monuments to my own laziness." Suffice to say the protagonist spends more time on his feet these days. I do wonder if there's a mental health/gig work commentary hidden in here somewhere. I mean, there definitely is, but I don't know how deliberate it is.

Each level consists of a discreet checkerboard layout with various rooms, routes and obstacles. Shortly after you begin, the insects emerge from the crevices and come scuttling towards you, tile by tile. Fortunately, they only move when you do, which means you have an eternity between moves to size up their advance, and work out how to interrupt it by blocking windows and doors and sliding shelves around.

Endure The Swarm is the work of Ternary Designs, an indie studio otherwise known for the Zachtronics-inspired Meltdown: The Complete Guide to Reactor Maintenance and the disaster sim Heat Death, which “allows the player to see how long they can survive in a dying galaxy”. I detect a certain… grimness of outlook, though in fairness they are also the creators of relaxing puzzler A Stroll of the Dice.

There's a demo for Endure the Swarm on Steam. It runs a bit scruffily on my non-gaming work Thinkpad - at one point, the character got stuck on some geometry and I had to start over - and the early levels are simple to a fault, but I like the concept enough to pass it on. If it leaves you hungry for more sokoban, see the brilliant Void Stranger and the forthcoming Isles of Sea and Sky.