Sephonie is an indie 3D puzzle platformer about 3 researchers who are on an island trying to uncover its mysteries. Here is our Sephonie Review.
The game is developed by Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka and published by Analgesic Productions with the console port being made available by Ratalaika Games. It was first released on April 12, 2022, for PC but was ported over to consoles like PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch on July 21, 2022.
The story of Sephonie follows 2 different timelines, the first is in the now where Sephonie is looking for the 3 people she met in the past, but instead, she finds a nice surprise at the end of her trip. The second storyline is what happened in the past on the island where Sephonie lives, there the 3 main protagonists are tasked with gathering information on what is happening on the island and all the creatures that are living there.
The game is mainly focused on platforming and finding your way to the 5 key species that you need to find. At times, it was a bit hard to find my way through all the platforming places and while it does give you a goal to do, it’s hard to actually find it at times when you don’t really have a map. But it was kinda doable without that many issues other than sometimes going the wrong way after falling.
The story itself is fine, it didn’t really connect to me personally, but I do see that this is super unique and no AAA compares to it. Something that I didn’t expect to see was minor swearing like the words sh*t, caught me off guard, but it was also a bit nice to see, because I don’t think I have seen AAA games do this without having a 18+ rating.
Where the game really shines is its gameplay. The further you get in the game, the more elements the game introduces that both help you towards the next goal but also can slow you down. Some of these even get accompanied by some puzzles later on, where if you jump the black one disappears and the white one pops up, and when you jump they swap again, the same thing happens with red and blue ones but these get triggered by grappling onto a flying monster. It gets hard at some places, but it keeps being a lot of fun all the way through and each level keeps the game fresh. Out of nowhere, I noticed I had already spent about 5 hours in the game without even realizing it.
When capturing the creatures, some type of candy crush/Tetris mini-game gets used where the more you connect the colors with each other the more points you get. This also introduced its own set of challenges from rocks you need to break to little fishies that break blocks if they touch them. All the gameplay elements melted together perfectly and you never really spend too much time at 1 thing to the point where it gets annoying.
The only thing I personally didn’t like at the start was the visuals, it just didn’t grab me as much early on, but it ended up growing on me a lot and the more I played, the more I started to appreciate this style and enjoying just looking around the world more as well.
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