A weird little parkour platformer game where you play as a team of three guys exploring an island and its vast cave systems and ecosystem with some puzzle minigames that borders on experimental.
You play as a squad of research explorers who are researching the island using some new experimental tech that allows your team to learn rather intimately about the ecosystem of the island, as well as boosting your mobility to let you dash, wall-run, wall bounce, and eventually, grapple.
The island Sephonie is a mysterious place protected by a magical barrier that will cause tremendous electrical damage to anything trying to pass through it. Unaware of this fact, our research squad end up out-cold on the beach, one of whom has a serious infection. Once you learn more about the environment, and share your results with the team, your mysterious magic* inplants will take the data, and use it immediately to protect yourselves from the native bacteria in the same way as the fauna of the island can.
A lot of the story goes like this. You explore around the island and its cave network in order to link with more species of flora and fauna and add their abilities to your own. Wait a minute this sounds a lot like a metroidvania!
The campaign isn’t quite that big though. The island has 3 floors of caves, and the surface. Each floor has 2 side areas, one small, one much bigger, and as you adventure and explore, you learn the layout of each of the floors and the best way to navigate them. As you progress through the story, not only do you get to learn the backstory and relationships between these explorers, but so does the island itself. It’s a very spiritual place, in a far far more literal way than something like Mount Celeste is.
To actually link with these flora and fauna though, you will have to interact with the game’s other main gameplay loop: the block puzzles. Each species has a specific shape and size of grid with its own hazards and boons, and you have to place your pieces into that grid in a way that 3 or more squares of the same colour (red, green or blue) are connected orthogonally. Larger groups = more points, and you need to reach a certain points threshold before the end of each turn or you’ll lose a life. At the end of the turn, your cells clear, some cells multiply, and the organism generates more objects in specified places. You can see how each hazard works with the describe button. Just a few to give the idea: Slimes will destroy the block placed on them, then be removed; stones will block placement, but be destroyed when an adjacent square is filled; and bonus tiles will multiply the points of whatever group is placed on them.
Once you beat the game and epilogue, you unlock a few bonus developer goodies, which all start at Bubble Adventure, where each map has a number of bubbles to pop in a platforming challenge, and reaching thresholds unlocks more content in the developer room on the surface. Starting with a debug mode that allows teleportation to areas and maps on a hotkey, then unlocking debug maps, concept work, extra puzzles that didn’t make it into the main game, and finally a super speed option to make navigation around debug areas much much easier especially when combined with infinite jump.
This game has 2 accessibility options: infinite air-dash and infinite jump. Both break the game, but infinite air-dash breaks it less. They’re useful if you are struggling with certain platforming sections as it does not validate any achievements to turn them on, and may help avoid frustration. I used them only towards the end of my run to clean up a few bubbles and explore the place.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1248840 £16.75
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/sephonie £16.75
itch.io: https://han-tani.itch.io/sephonie $19.99
Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Sephonie-2415613.html £19.99
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