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.
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.