Is This Seat Taken?

You have three shapes: Square, Triangle and Circle. All three have been seated next to each other at a table, but they have their own requests. Triangle wants to sit to the right of the shape with the most sides, while Circle wants to sit as far away from shapes with acute angles as possible – Square is happy in any seat; they are simply excited to be included.

It’s not a complex problem, but this form of rudimentary logic puzzle about sorting people or objects by statements about them not only forms the basis for a beloved type of pen-and-paper puzzle found in the magazine aisles but also sets the foundation for Is This Seat Taken? – the latest offering from Poti Poti Studios as part of Wholesome Games.

Starting in a small taxi, you are given various characters who, aside from being shapes, are also individuals with their own needs, each asking for specific seats or preferences for how they would like to sit. Maybe two characters want a window seat, or two people would like to sit together, but in this simple microcosm of the three shapes and the three seats, the rules of the world are established, alongside the story that comes with it.

Each puzzle takes a different form, sometimes repeating an earlier format with larger or more complex situations, but each with an ever-increasing number of characters demanding the best seat in the house (or bus, or cinema, or wedding) – where anybody else would insist you can’t please everybody. Is This Seat Taken? scoffs at the idea, requiring the player to work out the optimal way to place each character to best suit them – anybody who has played The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks will instantly recognise this puzzle as a parallel of the Anouki problems.

Early levels are fairly simple in nature: place people in seats that match their tastes, place people who would like to sit together in adjoining seats, move more pungent people away from those with particularly sensitive noses and so forth. This escalates over time: new conditions are added, people with more advanced requests join the fray, and you also begin to see conditions arise that need more than just reading comprehension to understand – the most obvious being the tall-hat-toting cinema-goers being best placed without anybody behind them.

The most unexpected part of the game comes in the form of a story of self-discovery, navigating prejudice and rhombuses, although this covers only a small part of the many micro-narratives expressed throughout the game – much like Thomas Was Alone, the game has an uncanny ability to make the player sympathise with the various shapes that wander the world. If I had a nickel for every time a game had made me feel empathy for a four-sided shape, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Puzzles will get more difficult as they escalate, with new factors overlapping throughout each chapter and a number of bonus puzzles giving the player an even more fiendish challenge to test their mettle – it also adds more substance to what is evidently a stylish game, and I’m not just talking about the large array of fancy hats on show!

It’s hard not to talk about style in Is This Seat Taken? which, despite a simplistic colour palette, is absolutely brimming with artistic delight. The game does a brilliant job of showing each scenario with only the necessary details to back it up, letting the player infer what they need to about the scene, which in itself adds an extra layer to the puzzle-solving – the stippling effect on the floor for shading, the use of a warm colour palette and the expressive faces of each character add to the comfortable charm it radiates. 

It’s not just visual charm either, with each satisfying pop and plunk of a person being picked from their place backed up by what can best be described as ‘high-end elevator music’. There is a definite cosy nature to the game that finds itself amplified by the ambience that backs the entire game, never once feeling out of place or annoying. It strikes me as the kind of soundtrack that might never be considered iconic but will definitely end up on a few ‘songs to study to’ playlists. 

The game isn’t particularly long, with its runtime being only a few hours depending on your proficiency with logic puzzles, but this short length suits Is This Seat Taken? and even helps alleviate one of its biggest issues – even at its most difficult, the puzzle experience of the game quickly plateaus, meaning the challenge never grows into a difficult experience where your wits feel fully tested – instead, the puzzles only evolve in style, with facets of each puzzle changing to give the illusion of growing difficulty.

There’s definitely room for improvement where difficulty is concerned, but it makes the game more accessible to a wider audience – perhaps in future we might see additional puzzles in the same vein as A Little To The Left and its Seeing Stars DLC, where the focus was on thinking outside the box to find unique solutions. Regardless of the future of the game, Is This Seat Taken? remains a brilliant puzzle experience both in delightful gameplay and design.

(If you were wondering, the answer is Circle on the left, Square in the middle and Triangle on the right!)