I played through the demo of Is This Seat Taken during the Steam Next Fest and was immediately taken by the game's charm and puzzles. It was released at a pretty cheap price so I picked it up and have been playing it off and on.

The game has a simple, fun art style. The world is bright & colorful and everyone is little shapes. With a puzzle game like this, you want the game to be easy to read, which the art style makes possible. The music is a repeating track that is low key enough to just add a nice ambience to your playtime. There is one part of the soundtrack where the game plays some chimes that sounded like maybe I did something wrong in the puzzle. It was an odd music sting that took a minute to get used to.

The story is nothing to write home about, but you also shouldn't go into a puzzle game like this expecting a narrative heavy experience. The levels are broke into different chapters, each one being a different city, like London, Barcelona, New York. They don't really change what the levels actually look like. You are globetrotting because we are following Nat, a rhombus who wants to be a famous actor, she's trying to meet her hero & when that goes awry, she works on creating her own movie. It's a coming-of-age story lite. Nat doubts herself and learns to let others help her and not give up on her dreams. It's a sweet little story, but it's not going to be the reason you can't put this game down.

That honor belongs to gameplay. The best way I can explain this game is that it reminds me of these old Puzzlemania magazines I used to get all the time as a kid. There was one puzzle that would appear in them where there were rows of people that you had to find the similarities between. Is This Seat Taken isn't exactly like that, but in a similar vain you have to organize people in seats. Each level sets up a certain condition, you may have to seat people in a movie theater, on a bus, or in a classroom. The puzzle element is each person has different demands to meet. One person may want to sit next to a window, another may be a kid that wants to sit with their parent, and then another is someone who is smelly because they forgot to shower. And as the game progresses the demands get tougher, like someone may want to both not sit next to a smelly person and sit at the back of the theater. So, you think you've got the puzzle solved until you realize the last person you need to seat doesn't want to sit next to a kid and the only spots you have left are next to kids. There were a few times in the late game where I did get stumped for a bit, but I was able to figure out every puzzle without a walkthrough. And I was never frustrated, the challenge the game provides is a fun challenge.

All in all, Is This Seat Taken is a simple little puzzle game with a lot of charm, but not much to go into detail about. It is great for picking up and playing at your own pace. The controls are not complicated, so you don't have to worry about forgetting them if you drop the game for a month or so. If you enjoy a good little puzzle game, I can heartily recommend Is This Seat Taken.

This is a nice puzzle game with cute presentation and an interesting mechanic. You need to arrange a bunch of polygon-people in a room, or a car, or a beach, in a way to respect their preferences. So the square that doesn't like strong odours cannot sit next to the triangle with too much cologne.

It works well but even as short as it is, it's still gets a bit repetitive. There's not a lot of room for the mechanic to evolve, I guess. It feels like it should be one element of a larger puzzle game with other mechanics that interact with each other.

The only curveball is the levels where shapes that eat popcorn or nachos dirty their seats, so the following stage carries the memory of your previous solution. This adds a literal new dimension to the problem and can be an interesting extra challenge; you now need to think not only of how to solve the level, but how to solve it in a way that makes the next level solvable. Unfortunately, that mechanic can make some levels impossible to solve, so you need to go back to the previous level to change the solution... which the game doesn't allow. You need to reset the whole section and start from the beginning.

A lovely little puzzle game that isn't especially ambitious but has flawlessly executed on their core premise. The art style is very cute, and I enjoyed the light, sweet story delivered through NPC dialogue (text boxes with Simlish-style audio) at the start each new scenario.

I especially liked the puzzles where I had some control over environmental elements like turning lights or AC on/off, moving decor around an office space, and moving food items to different tables at a diner. This really added to the complexity of finding ideal conditions for everyone.

Especially fun/challenging were the scenarios where some NPCs eat food, and leave a mess at their seat when the scene turns over and new NPCs arrive, some of whom won't be willing to sit in those messy seats left by the previous group. This really forced me to think strategically about where to place my eating NPCs when there were multiple suitable options - as much as possible I would try to seat them in already-dirty seats, to minimize how many dirty seats I ended up with by the end, and avoid giving them valuable corner seats so that if a smelly or loud NPC didn't want a dirty seat, I wouldn't be forced to seat them in the dead center of the room where they're in proximity to more other seats.

100% completion took me about 9 hours. If you like cute puzzle games, go pick this one up - you're sure to love it!

Is This Seat Taken? is a bit of a tough game to write a review for because I think for what it is, it performs virtually perfectly. It's a light little puzzle game about helping friendly shape-guys find the right place to sit in a public space based on their specific needs. The visuals are charming. The gameplay is easy to understand but requires some thought. It never crossed the line into frustrating. I moved along at a pretty brisk pace and there was just enough content for it to take five to six sittings before I was finished and well satisfied with my time spent with the game. All this is excellent, but it never really wowed me. I feel a bit bad giving it a four star rating as a result, but hey, that's how it goes.

I can think of a few specific points of praise and maybe a few criticisms though. Let's start with the praise. There's a cute little side story that plays out across the game's levels. The narrative is nothing particularly riveting but seeing the recurring characters pop up put a smile on my face. It's just a sweet side attraction that never felt like it got in the way of the game. The visuals, as previously mentioned, are very charming and playful. There're plenty of various objects you can click on in the environment to get neat little animations. The humor is also low key, but pretty decent for my tastes.

As far as criticisms, it mostly boils down to minor control issues and some very small quality of life stuff. I played on the Switch, which felt like the natural platform for a game like this. It was fine for the most part, but the controller inputs often had issues with double clicking when I had tapped once. Also, maneuvering a cursor with a joystick never feels good. The way the cursor "magnetizes" to clickable objects actually made clicking the right thing in cluttered spaces much harder than it should have been. As a result I often made use of the touch screen, which makes this one of the few Switch games I've played with it.

And finally, once you start a level, you aren't allowed to save, quit, and later resume it. You need to beat it or you'll lose your progress. This kind of sucks for a game that feels built around its cozy pick-up-and-play atmosphere. Levels aren't too long, thankfully, but it's an odd exclusion in a game that mostly feels well thought out.