Sephonie Review: Words Do Not Fail This Otherwise Evocative 3D Platformer

The line between a leisurely atmosphere and an aimless one is quite thin, and Sephonie often drifts across it.

Sephonie
Photo: Analgesic Productions

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. 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. 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.

Sephonie as a whole is quite relaxed, with linking in particular featuring no time limit and set to gorgeous, meditative music. The linking process manifests as a series of block-matching puzzles, where you connect clumps of red, blue, and green cells. Consistent with the game’s ideas about biological harmony, the cell blocks that you place are derived from species you’ve linked before. For one, a beached whale has a block of two blue cells and two red cells that each jut out in opposite directions. 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.

But the line between a leisurely atmosphere and an aimless one is quite thin, and Sephonie often drifts across it. 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. 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.

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If the goal of the developers at Analgesic Productions is to emphasize the atmosphere of the game’s world over simple tests of skill, it never quite succeeds at making the island into a believable place. While Sephonie has less overt signposting and far fewer collectibles than most of its contemporaries, it can’t shake the lineage of the platformer genre, which deals much more successfully in abstract obstacle courses than coherent spaces.

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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. 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. Even the creatures meant to suggest the life of the island function more like collectibles rewarded for navigating some challenging terrain.

Sephonie’s most evocative sequences actually lean into the genre’s artifice, as certain caves take on the warped form of human surroundings. Drawing from the researchers’ minds, the island twists things like a mall, a Japanese cityscape, and a cornfield-laden stretch of the Midwestern United States into gravity-defying gauntlets. Filled with half-remembered dialogue and sparsely detailed character models, these sequences evoke a world we recognize, and our imagination fills in the rest. The ordinary cave networks, though, don’t have the same luxury: With their floating flowers and dash-recharging fungi, they only ever feel like video game levels, even though they’re meant to be the more naturalistic environments.

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And yet, Sephonie seems not to trust even its more arresting, abstract imagery to speak to its concerns, as it expands on every nuance through gobs of explanatory text. Throughout, we hear the characters and the anthropomorphized representation of the island, even the inner thoughts of various creatures. Occasionally, Sephonie marries images and text to poetic effect, as in one striking sequence that traces all the different memories of places, people, and situations that stem from the simple act of eating fish. Mostly, though, the researchers go on tangents ranging from favorite foods to Taiwanese identity to biological weaponry, many of them ambitious in their themes but mind-numbing in their length and their frequency.

Sephonie’s thematic scope is admirably wide-ranging, but its wordiness only crowds a game whose mechanics are tenuously connected. For a game that concerns the interconnectedness of all things, it’s unfortunate how awkwardly some of its pieces are glued together.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by Analgesic Productions.

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 Developer: Analgesic Productions  Publisher: Analgesic Productions  Platform: PC  Release Date: April 12, 2022

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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