A couple years ago, when one of my friends got married, she put almost all of her friends from university – myself included – on a table at the back. As she did her rounds, stopping by our table to thank us for coming, one of us jokingly asked her if she’d put us here so we wouldn’t be able to annoy the rest of the room with our cheering. Sweetly, she responded that no, it was because we were the heaviest drinkers in the room, and this table was the closest one to the bar, so we’d get our drinks topped up the quickest.
I’m still convinced that it was a little of both, but I appreciated the thought. Wedding planning seems like hell, but as a lover of Excel sheets and Google docs, I think I would find a strange pleasure in making seating plans in particular. You need to know your guests well, what they want, who they have beef with, so on and so forth.
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Is This Seat Taken? Makes Seating Fun
Assuming you’re not a sicko like me, this might not sound fun to you, but the demo for Is This Seat Taken? is pretty fun regardless of if you get stressed out by logistical nightmares. The game is basically seat planning, distilled down to the simplest of gameplay loops. You’re given some sort of scene – a bus, an outdoor concert, a cinema, even, yes, a wedding – and a group of people with specific preferences that must be catered to.
Take the bus, for example: maybe some of these people didn’t shower in the morning and are kind of stinky, so you won’t want to put them next to people who are sensitive to strong smells. Maybe some of them want to sleep, so they don’t want to be around people playing loud music or chatting. Maybe they want to be by the window, or the aisle, or to stand. You’ll arrange and rearrange these people according to their preferences, reshuffling plans as people get on and off.
These preferences change depending on the scenario. In the cinema, people might have specific preferences as to which row they want to sit in. They might not want to sit behind people with big hats, or might want to be next to someone with popcorn so they can steal it. At the concert, they may want to stand, or prefer a further away but more comfortable seating option. At the wedding, they might have people they absolutely don’t want to sit next to, because they hate them.
A Globetrotting Journey
Oh, also, you’re seating shapes with little legs and shoes on, and maybe some accessories. It’s very cute. One of these shapes is a rhombus named Nat. She’s an aspiring actress who doesn’t think she has what it takes to make it in showbiz, so she never really puts herself out there, even when a director friend asks her to audition for his indie film. Nobody wants to cast a rhombus like her, she insists, until she sees a movie (you’ll seat her in the cinema yourself) and sees an actress the same shape as her.
While the demo doesn’t go this far, the game follows her on a globetrotting journey to meet her new idol. Unfortunately, the demo only gives us access to one city, Barcelona, but even this alone offers players a pretty hefty dive into the game’s potential for complexity.
Is This Seat Taken? is the perfect ‘one more level’ game, and I was left wishing there was more when I wrapped up the demo. I don’t know where Nat’s journey will take her, but I know I’m along for the ride, and I’ll be picking her seats for her the whole way through.
Casual
Puzzle
Point-and-click
- Developer(s)
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Poti Poti Studio
- Publisher(s)
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Wholesome Games Presents