Sometimes, a game can live rent-free in your head, despite never having played it. That’s been “Is This Seat Taken?” for me. Announced just a couple short weeks ago, I’ve watched the trailer a bunch of times, forced other people to watch it a bunch of times, and even taken it upon myself to force my phone on acquaintances to watch it a bunch more. So, it might have caught my attention. Is This Seat Taken? is a puzzler built around the idea that people don’t like sitting next to most other people. You have to balance the needs of everyone, despite the fact that they smell, they’re messy, and hell, they might pull their phone out and make you watch random game trailers. The monsters.
Each level of Is This Seat Taken? presents you with a setting, and then a batch of people you need to place within it. The first level is a taxi, getting you used to dragging and dropping your little folks onto the available seats, while their desire card pops up at the bottom of the screen.
Things start out simple enough – Jordi wants a window seat, when there’s two available, and Aurora prefers to sit alone, so she can sit on the other end of the row. They’re both very reasonable about it too, and there’s no pushing or shoving which tells you this must be a fantasy world.
Then you find yourself dealing with a limousine. Suddenly, there’s five people to deal with, the seats all face different directions, and each person has two needs rather than one. After various roles in hospitality, I’m all about making customers happy, but I’m already sweating the details. Given that you’re essentially doing this for reviews or likes – a thumbs up shows you’ve picked a good seat – I’m now beginning to worry about being reviewed on SeatAdvisor. This isn’t supposed to be stressful is it?
Juggling the different needs of each person becomes increasingly tricky, and through the demo you find the numbers of people you’re dealing with steadily increase. A bus journey proves really interesting, with people getting on and off, and a bunch of new needs like wanting to sleep or – the horror – wanting to play loud music. I mean, there should be an option to forcibly eject those people at the bus stop, but anyway.
There’s little snippets of storyline woven into some of the scenes, with indie movie director Alexis helping their actor friend Nat to feel at ease, while we learn all about Hat Wars fandom, where the movies are great but the fans are awful. It seems as though Is This Seat Taken? has an awful lot to say about the world, despite being a game about little shape people being polite and sitting in the right seats. It’s a great combination.
Despite the complicated human interactions, Is this seat taken? is a joyful and upbeat game. The laidback tunes help to ease the trickier puzzle moments, and you’re helped along the way by the changing expressions of each sitter, telling you whether they’re content or not.
You can check out Is This Seat Taken for yourself right now, with the demo available to download on Steam, ahead of its release on PC and mobile later this year.