I've never played an Analgesic game before despite being very interested in how Anodyne 2 looks, but Sephonie stood out to me as a puzzle platformer and looking just weird enough to be up my alley.

Any fellow Canadians reading this, if you remember the "Short Circuitz" clips that used to play during commercials on YTV back in the day, this game feels and sounds like that. It really nails the bizarre, dreamscape setting of the island and the music evokes that N64 keys/synth style that is so familiar to a lot of us that it tickles that special little spot in the back of your brain - that weird little sad nostalgia zone that causes certain emotions. Like exploring an empty Super Mario 64 level or lonely Ocarina Of Time dungeon. The track that plays during the puzzle bits especially gives me that specific feeling - it feels so familiar and lonely.

This game is made exclusively by 2 people and I give them loads of credit where its due - the imaginative ways it displays its world and the creative story and writing that broadens the characters, their past, and their connection to the island, really makes this a great piece of art.

The game does feel clunky during certain platforming/wall-running sections, and I found myself failing to do things that felt like it wasn't my fault, but the game itself. You'll run at a wall at the exact angle you need to and jump onto it and it just won't work sometimes. The running itself takes some getting used to, and you'll find yourself speeding off the edge many times. BUT when it works, and when it clicks, and you're pulling off really awesome platforming and using your brain to reach nooks and crannies, it feels great. I applaud a team of 2 people that can make tricky platforming work at all.

Sephonie is a game that feels like it could use a bunch of gameplay polish to make it shine that much brighter, but at the end of the day it shines in its own special way. Truly unique and aspirational game design, presentation and writing.

It's intelligent and spiritual. The biological snippets of each creature, their ecological place... it's all very good and heartfelt, as with the spirit telling the story. It's just too corny, too timid, the story too direct and exposition-filled.

I'm not quite sure what's wrong. It's not lacking in confidence, but in asking me if I want to turn off mechanics frequently, it feels uncommitted. Would children like this? It just doesn't work for me. Maybe I just don't like platformers, or tetris.

A great platformer from Analgesic Productions.
While the moveset is limited, sometimes even clunky, it feels free. Levels large but offer a lot of variety. Figuring out how to navigate them is a lot of fun. Optional collectibles are placed just out of reach, and challenge you to figure out how to get them.
The Link puzzles are easy but offer a nice break from platforming.
Visually and aurally pleasing, and the writing is excellent. Characters feel real and complex, which helps to elevate the story.

Analgesic Productions continues to scratch a very specific artistic itch. This time in the flavour of "made during the pandemic".

Sephonie is an interesting mashup of unique 3D platforming, a hybrid tetromino/colour-match puzzle, and talking about the nature of human interaction.

Go in knowing the game is surprisingly dialogue heavy, and both gameplay types are fun. Would recommend.

what i crave more then just ab anything in my time as an Art Appreciator is pieces that resonate so intrinsically and cohesively with some aspect of my heart that literally every single moment spent with it is full of emotion, even when not prodded by some narrative or structural crescendo. video games r often uniquely suited to having relatively long stretches of breath and quiet inbetween everything (with the understanding that the engagement of Mere Interaction is enough to keep attention), and thus of all mediums have evoked this feeling for me perhaps the most. very very few have come anywhere close to this...the sobriety of its ending (even post-epilogue, to a lesser degree) hit me like a truck because of how completely on the wavelength i was: of the game, the heroes, the island. it did all still Matter ofc, and im glad for that catharsis,,,but if im to take the pre-epilogue ending at its word, i must also make do with being separated from its beautiful protective shell that i became so intimately entwined with. simultaneously analgesic's most spellbinding game and the one that breaks the spell to the greatest effect...just ab the most convincingly brechtian indie game studio out there. this is not anodyne 3, but it is a meaningful continuation of those games, specifically the original game's structural anti-crescendo.

i feel like i could write a book on this thing...i havent even rly discussed How it got me so intwined , from its extremely deliberate attention-demanding platforming/level design (a refreshing and gutsy design choice considering Maximum Effortless Flexibility tends to be the way indie 3d platformers are going), the calm but similarly attention-demanding puzzle segments, the dizzyingly layered writing, the peak of their Dreamy Lo-fi aesthetic from anodyne 2, melos' best music to date....i dont have it all in me rn. and if im being completely honest with myself, anodyne 2 does hit me a lot more specifically and personally, and winds up a wee bit more of a powerful text as a result. but this is almost certainly Analgesic's magnum opus, as game design, as storytelling, as the Realization That The Line Between The Two Is Kinda Meaningless. a better way to live, a correct way to care.

90% atmosphere, 10% gameplay

Stunning visuals, great music, interesting dialogue, confusing plot, kinda bad platforming, poor level design

Unfortunately, I also found the core puzzle gameplay to be a little samey and easy, although it suddenly picked up a bit and got very interesting towards the end, though was very under-explored. Same with the platforming! Some of the best stuff is in the last 15 mins or so of gameplay, which sucks!

Nothing too unusual for an Analgesic game, but games like this, with nontraditional characters and unorthodox game design choices, can't be found anywhere else, so I'm glad it exists.

A puzzle and platforming game (not a puzzle-platformer) surrounding an unconventional sci-fi workplace drama. Three scientists confront the red tape of international research, the constraints of careerism, the material content of their lives, their relationship with each other, and also an emerging alien existential and viral threat to the planet. I had a lot of apprehension at the size of this game and the breadth of subject matter is pulling in, but this is maybe my favorite container for the Analgesic team's prose. Some of the jumps fucking blow and the camera is a constant antagonist as it always is in our current era of 3D platformers, but the accessibility options offer a wide gradient of curating difficulty such that anyone should have a good time.

Moving between methodical platforming to color match puzzle games is, at once, disorienting and perfectly connected. The emotional overture of this game is largely about the capability for adaptation all life has and the eventual ease of snapping between disparate Video Game Challenges drives this home so so well. The whole "middle class people with a lot of resources realize they can imagine and design actionable steps for a better world" will always be a weak narrative goal for me, but the kind of dilemmas of the workplace and nationalism that haunt these characters is delivered in the described gameplay loop that has linked the often overly-dreamlike prose to reality.

i really liked anodyne 1 and 2 not only because they were great games but because i thought they pushed me right exactly to my skill level; unfortunately, sephonie has surpassed my skill ceiling.

it clearly has the stuff i love. writing with heart about little-discussed themes around ecology and being in relationship with nature. the platforming is unique, the level design is tantalizing, and hey, they even have the accessibility controls to tweak it in a way that means i could theoretically see this to the end.

i'm just.... not.... going to? i don't think? maybe i'll come back later?

There's something terribly violent about living...

Sephonie is one of a handful games that I've been checking out specifically because I've seen it on other people's Game of the Year lists and it wasn't on my radar at all. Sephonie is an island, or maybe better described as the manifestation of the essence of the island. Sephonie is the game's narrator, or, at least for a while? Sephonie is one of the most strange characters I have ever seen in a game. It's like a Half-Life zombie texture stretched across a Kingdom Hearts nobody's model, wearing some kind of clownish leotard and high-tops.

The game is quite eclectic, a unique blend that's sort of difficult to describe in brief, but follows a clear pattern. You traverse a branching cave system using wall-runs and air-dashes, your main goal is to find creatures and interact with them by solving a puzzle minigame; whenever you find the "boss" puzzle and complete it, you get a long cutscene that usually details some aspect of one of the playable characters' lives, and you get a new ability that helps you reach a new area. While the core gameplay is platforming and puzzle solving, the progression through the gameworld could be compared to a "metroid/vania", and the overall structure of both the narrative and delineation of gameplay styles could be compared to a JRPG.

Sephonie is doing a lot of things that I really like. This game has one of the best soundtracks of this past year. It has a rather pleasing aesthetic style in both its environments and characters. I like that it's a platformer with no enemies, no combat; the challenge is firstly in getting somewhere, and second in the puzzle "encounters" which while having an adversarial tone in gameplay are contextualized in narrative as a kind of hybrid of scientific analysis and spiritual resonance. The game is generally nonviolent enough that it makes me wonder why stage hazards and bottomless pits exist in the game at all, it seems needlessly treacherous.

I almost never feel like I'm actually going the right way, even when I know I am. Maybe this is thematically appropriate for an expedition to a remote island, but it's no surprise to me that the game features its walkthrough on the main menu so prominently. The game has a lot of narrative, text, dialogue, cutscenes, the gameplay at times feels like a secondary part of the experience, and the puzzle elements are very slow. The game is clearly geared towards a casual, comfy, "wholesome" crowd, but there are so many points where I could easily see someone beating their head against a wall; fruitlessly trying to interact with something they can't yet, trying to make a jump to an unusually attention-grabbing background element, or mistaking the unusually obtuse forward path for a dead end. "Unnatural" isn't the right word, if anything the level design is naturalistic to the point of being hostile.

The puzzles are very easily to clear, but very difficult to clear with any degree of elegance. By the time I had finished the opening coral puzzles, I assumed this game would have some theme of "it's fine to make mistakes because everything will be fine in the end". I'm pretty sure the reason the puzzles were so easy was because I had sought out many of the optional creatures, and I think solving each new puzzle adds a piece to your "deck" which probably opens up a wider variety of potential moves.

Whatever the case, I assumed that the game's narrative would more closely parallel its puzzle mechanics, and would deal with the main trio learning more about and opening up to one another; while some of that does go on as a kind of necessity of the nature of their research, it's far from the story's throughline. I don't really know if I think the game has one singular narrative focus, I was more confident in my interpretation before I played the epilogue. It's a work that seems pessimistic about the present, but optimistic about the future, a work where the personal lives of these characters, real world events and politics, and broad stroke concepts don't quite feel like they come together into a single statement. It's just juggling a few too many big ideas for me to even know where to start.

In both its narrative and its gameplay, Sephonie is at times too complex for its own good. The final platforming stage introduces something like half a dozen new mechanics; new platforms, new walls, locked doors, keys that rotate around the player and kill you if they touch anything, a "cosmic Mario" style player ghost that you need to avoid, and I very well may be forgetting something. Nearly every new puzzle introduces a new space or block type, and the game has a dedicated button for telling you what the properties of the currently highlighted block and space are.

I wonder if I'm coming across as more negative than I mean to, but while I did ultimately enjoy the game I also found it frustrating. At times I think it seems impenetrable, at other times I wonder if there's much else under the surface. Whether it's a masterwork or just working through the time in which it was made, Sephonie does at least feel like a genuine piece of personal art in an affecting way not many games did this year.

LOVED this game.

The leitmotif is wonderful. Have had it stuck in my head since I started playing and now still after. Various variations pop in randomly. I'm humming along.

Beautiful expressive platforming. You are pretty quickly doing some wild stuff. It's really good at unlocking your platformer potential for you. I don't have to look up how to double jump off Cappy to get to secrets, the wild shit is just baked in and gradually taught. And yeah you can still do the wild shit for secrets because it's a platformer. As it should be.

Every key species link story moment is absurd. Resounding, thoughtful, intriguing. Feels like a culmination of years of itch style storytelling in games.

Another great Analgesic Productions game. I found the controls kind of finicky, but it's such an amazingly creative platformer, the game makes you string together moves in very creative ways, and the levels always felt so natural, reaching a place felt like a discovery instead of you just completing a trial.

The abstract visuals and melancholic surrealism are also in full force here, but this time there's a more concrete, more "real-world issues" story that I found really poignant. Loved to learn more about these characters, and the themes let me pondering for a while.

As always, very excited for whatever comes next.

Overall, Sephonie is a delightful experience and feels unique and well-crafted. I think it falls short somewhat, due to issues with the movement mechanics and some clunky-ish dialogue. But even in those areas, I would say it's more that that they're good but not great, especially in comparison to other games in a similar category.

Before I expand on the flaws, I wanna just mention the really good bits. The enviroments are wonderful and really sell the setting (along with the music, which is fantastic), and the plot is heartfelt, thoughtful, and has some cool ideas. I especially loved all the creatures they came up with for you to link with - I found myself wishing a lot of them were real, haha. And despite the issues with the mechanics, the level design nonetheless feels tight and focused, and the linking puzzles were always fun without being too difficult.

As for my criticisms - my issues with the dialogue were really just that a lot of it felt awkward or clumsy (and not like, in an intentional way) - just in need of refining. I feel I should emphasize that it's still much better than most games - depsite the flaws, I found myself really invested in the characters and rarely felt the urge to just skip through any of the text. But it definitely felt a bit lackluster.

As for the control issues, this one is a little more nuanced. The wallrunning is a great idea in theory and in practice it mostly works. But I find that the natural-looking environments really harm readability and navigability. It's hard to figure out what angle to hit a curved wall, and its hard to tell when the curved wall will get "too curved" and you'll fall off, and if the wall is curving away from the camera, its hard to even see where you're wallrunning to. This problem extends a little to platforming in general - sometimes the collision is matched to oddly shaped walls or platforms and they just feel unnecessarily funky to move around on. I also had some control issues with the dash not working as expect but at this point I'm probably just rambling lol. That said, none of these were a huge issue for beating the main game, just because they never require you to be too perfect to get past anything. I definitely noticed it but I could live with it. It did get to be a real problem after I beat the game and went for the bonus challenges, though - I still did a lot of them, but others I completely gave up on just because of the control issues I was having. Which is not a huge deal since they're optional, its just unfortunate because the controls are interesting enough that I really want to fall in love with them.

So, bottom line - I strongly recommend playing it unless you're super picky about smooth movement or dialogue writing. Melos and Marina have done a great job crafting a beautiful little game, despite its flaws.

La isla Sephonie recibe la visita de tres científiques varades en la playa, con la misión de explorar sus profundidades y descubrir las fascinantes criaturas de este paraje nunca hollado por la civilización. La americana Amy Lim, la taiwanesa Ing-Wen y el japonés Riyou forman la expedición: tres personajes controlables con propiedades idénticas entre sí (incluso pueden intercambiarse al vuelo pulsando un botón) y de apariencia mundana, pero capaces de realizar maniobras de parkour sobrehumanas gracias al sistema neuronal ONYX que llevan acoplado en el cerebro. Sin embargo, la característica más peculiar de este implante es su capacidad para conectar con la esencia viva e identificar sus propiedades, sus más oscuros orígenes y pensamientos. Sephonie, la representación material del intimismo de los tres exploradores (incapaces de conectar entre sí de tal agarrados que están al método científico), esconde un fascinante entramado de flora y fauna inverosímiles y simbióticas; que forman un vínculo, un todo lo une que atrapará a todo el que se adentre en su interior. Y con ello, sus recuerdos más recónditos saldrán a la luz.

Al igual que en anteriores obras de Analgesic Productions, 'Sephonie' es conducido por viñetas costumbristas mezcladas con un toque onírico, a menudo surrealista, que abren un espacio para la reflexión y ahondar en el individuo social, su identidad y su lugar en el mundo. No obstante, 'Sephonie' se siente bastante más ofuscado de lo habitual en Marina Kittaka y no termina de hilar su trama de manera satisfactoria, sin alcanzar un leifmotiv más amplio que resuelva los dilemas de los exploradores (incluso que progresen a lo largo de la aventura); sabiéndose basto y confuso. Se ven buenas intenciones dejando que los entornos de Sephonie hablen por sí mismos (something something narrativa emergente); también en el habla cercana de sus protagonistas. Pero es curioso como un juego enfocado en conectar entre sí se percibe tan desconectado a la hora de experimentarlo y jugarlo mando en mano.

Su página en Steam define la jugabilidad como "Tony Hawk-esque 3D platformer" y el resultado final dista mucho de parecérsele. Desde el primer instante, ninguna de sus mecánicas controlables se sienten agradables de manejar. Esprintar como el dragón Spyro y tener tan poca maniobrabilidad; correr por las paredes sólo funciona en un ángulo frente el plano muy específico; el dash en el aire que ocasionalmente no se transforma en doble salto en la pared por no estar pegado al milímetro a la misma; tener que pelearse con la cámara constantemente y su lupa distorsionada, que dificulta hasta el salto más básico. Por si fuera poco, el diseño estructural de Sephonie está compuesto de grandes espacios abiertos pero con una sóla ruta crítica, muy angosta de travesar, poco intuitiva a la hora de decirnos qué debemos hacer o dónde ir. Es curiosa la amargura que deja en el ambiente viniendo de 'Anodyne 2: Return to Dust', que ya incorporaba elementos de plataformas 3D bastante básicos, pero muy satisfactorios de manejar gracias al nulo riesgo que existía. 'Sephonie' exige maniobras más complejas que, a la mínima imperfección, obligan a repetir el paso y darse de cabezazos con la puerta por su mala leche asociada. Dentro de lo malo, el juego posee múltiples opciones de accesibilidad para evitar desafío alguno, pero no por ello evitan la insatisfacción de no sentirte partícipe de la aventura. Otra forma de desconectar.

Al conectar con las criaturas de la isla, 'Sephonie' cambia de género al puzle y ofrece un tablero a llenar con tetriminos de colores. Sin embargo, las mecánicas aquí se saben demasiado simples y malamente explicadas como para generar cierto interés o desafío en el intento. De hecho, la disonancia aquí está en la gran importancia que se le da al fenómeno de conectar con Sephonie… y que la gran mayoría de estas acciones sean opcionales y ofrezcan recompensas birriosas por completarlas. Casi todo se sabe opcional y prescindible en 'Sephonie', y no mola. Es un fracaso considerable viniendo de un título excelente como 'Anodyne 2', hasta el punto de hacerme dudar de mi abstinencia al jugarlo el año pasado. Pero dentro de lo malo, Analgesic demuestra tener potencial y tablas para elaborar experiencias originales en este mundillo, diversas y siempre evocadoras con 'Sephonie'. Simplemente me hubiera gustado conectar más con él de lo que lo hice al final.

another analgesic banger!!!!!!! i loved the story and can't stop listening to the music, but as i'm sitting here at 3 AM basking in the glow of 100% completion, i cannot get over how tightly designed this game is. the campaign is perfectly balanced to complete without tearing your hair out, but for platforming sickos i can highly recommend the Bubble Adventure post game collectathon to really get into the nitty gritty movement / control tech. astonishingly deep for a game with effectively two inputs. i almost want to fuck around and say something incendiary like This Is The Celeste Of 3D Platformers... will need to sit on that for a bit perhaps, but goddamn this game rocked!!!

I am a fan of every Analgesic game but coming off of Sephonie, this one is my least favourite. Although I got into the parkour-platforming and found the levels to be fun sprawling playgrounds for pretty tight maneuvering mechanics, I didn’t love it. I think that comes down to personal preference, though.

I have convicted criticism for the ONYX puzzle portions of the game. The game throws in a lot of curveballs into the puzzles but I never felt like I had to strategize. It was a very mindless activity for me and I never felt a connection to it, to touch on to one of the story’s themes of connection.

Actually, the story is pretty good. The plots are very basic but the thematic elements are strong. The characterization is pretty good. Like a lot of other Analgesic games, the characters are very actualized. They don’t come off as characters in a story: they come off as humans. Sometimes this leads to moments where their expressions are too subtle to be read, but the overall effect is that the story feels personal.

I liked the focus on Taiwanese culture and the character themes about immigration and being moved into unfamiliar cultures, the stuff about borders– all that stuff, it was fascinating. The text comes fast and hard but the themes looped around enough– it’s a rich narrative and will stick with me even as I walk away from the game feeling underwhelmed.

After playing Anodyne 1 and 2 this game was an immediate let down to me because how awkward and jank the controls are, mainly how awkward the run mechanics are because you're essentially like a bull in a china shop. This game would have much better served having a more traditional 3-D plaftformer control scheme. Really if ain't broke don't fix it and the devs trying to make this game controls more "unique" just soured the game for me, which is a shame because it seemed to have strong atmosphere from the jump. Getting a Steam refund while I can.

We're all still trying to figure ourselves out, right? I guess so. You think that maybe it's done this time but you're going to keep peeling back layers, then putting on new ones, an endless cycle until your last breath leaves. If you try to stop and think it's over for a bit, you'll eventually find yourself detached, leaving personal orbit to find yourselves without connection. Was that what was important? No, hold on, connection, that IS important. Let's dive deeper...
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Sephonie would like you to look at the painting again and see what you missed the first time. At first it was clear, every single piece here is meant to spark an internal reflection. That's how we might communicate with nature, or at least try. Connect it with us, and once we do that and consider what it means in terms of the whole island, maybe we can understand what we might move on with. Or, perhaps, we're all just trying to find meaning in the little things. That's not really the full story though, eventually we go home. The research is done, and we put up our dresses, and retire back from the day's work. Did the island come back with you? Or maybe you just box it, compartmentalize it as another 'day', send it to the back of your head. Obviously not every moment changes us, but eventually these bits combine, flashes of life that start to become distorted skyscrapers that interfere with the work ahead, and in connecting with others around you, you will find yourself confronting that. Maybe you'll spend hours, days, months, trying to piece those together back into an organized box. They fit before, they can fit again. At some point you have to reach out a hand for help, tie yourself to others that, whether you know or not, are on that same journey as yours.

In other, much less complicated and psuedo philosophical words, Sephonie wants to impart that connection isn't just a process in how it deals with yourself, but also how you might light the path for others by sharing your own memories, anxieties, and fears onto the beautiful greenery that are the lives around you. Boundaries still exist and we don't want to tear them asunder, less we become like dust, but we join hands and feel together, holding a steadfast, tightened grip. Whether near or fear, distant lights countries away or together in the same room staring into each other's eyes minutes before breaking down, we hope for beauty in the road ahead by trusting in each other.

I like that Sephonie was viscerally moved and shifted by the rise and eve of the pandemic. I like that as it gazed across the cities and towns who all had to isolate, it found that the biggest threat for a body that EXERTED FORCE, REFLECTED LIGHT, IN AN INSTANT COULD BE GONE, was releasing itself to nothing. Intimacy is our net, and a beating pulse of our heart. A strand of beauty linking you and I. How lucky!!!