Sephonie’s most evocative sequences actually lean into the genre’s artifice, as certain caves take on the warped form of human surroundings. Even the creatures meant to suggest the life of the island function more like collectibles rewarded for navigating some challenging terrain. As in so many 3D platformers, you begin to view the environment as a tool for your own progress, eyes searching for some arrangement of walls and outcroppings broken up over sufficiently jumpable distances. Walking through the game’s caves too often feels like the equivalent of entering a deceptively quiet room in a shooter where you can’t help but notice all the suspicious-looking scenery. The island, too, is hardly dangerous, with the animals all passively accommodating the researchers, who are perhaps as comfortable as their situation allows, to the point where they remark about how idyllic it is to get away from everything. Though more links give you more blocks to work with, the imprecise puzzle interface does little to emphasize your progress, and its use of progress bars rather than numbers makes strategizing difficult. Though you’ll learn to deal with new concepts on the fly, like roaming bacteria that destroys cells placed in its path or ventricles that only disappear when surrounded on three sides, the matching never gets too difficult.īut the line between a leisurely atmosphere and an aimless one is quite thin, and Sephonie often drifts across it. For one, a beached whale has a block of two blue cells and two red cells that each jut out in opposite directions. Consistent with the game’s ideas about biological harmony, the cell blocks that you place are derived from species you’ve linked before. The linking process manifests as a series of block-matching puzzles, where you connect clumps of red, blue, and green cells. Sephonie as a whole is quite relaxed, with linking in particular featuring no time limit and set to gorgeous, meditative music. In order to study this strange place, the researchers have been implanted with the ONYX system, which not only augments their physical prowess to the typical dashing, wall-running acrobatics of a platformer protagonist but allows them to “link” with each species they encounter for study.
The trio is subsequently left with little choice but to explore the island’s vast cave network, an interconnected ecosystem where all kinds of life flourish. Shooting for a more cohesive approach to the typical 3D platformer’s presentation of setting, Sephonie centers on three researchers who find themselves marooned on the titular island.