I relate a lot to the puzzles of Is This Seat Taken? I often do a lot of mental math to choose a suitable seat in a doctor’s waiting room or movie theater. I don’t want to sit near anyone wearing cologne or perfume, because it gives me a headache; in fact, I’ll try to avoid sitting near anyone, which I don’t think is particularly unique. (It’s actually quite diabolical to take a seat near someone else in a near empty room.) In a car or on a bus, I’m particularly prone to motion sickness in certain spots towards the back. And on an airplane, I always choose the aisle; I get up to pee a lot.
Is This Seat Taken? is a puzzle game from developer Poti Poti Studios in which you’re tasked with creating a seating chart for people with particularities like me in cars, buses, diners, movie theaters, concerts, and elsewhere. Developers Ausiàs Dalmau and Sergi Pérez told me that Is This Seat Taken? is supposed to be relatable but relaxed. Spend as much time as you want on the puzzles; it’s both a game and a toy that’s meant to be played with.
“We want people to explore the different reactions between characters without any negative repercussions,” the developers said. “Also, there is no single way to solve the levels, allowing people to be creative and come up with their own resolutions.”
In a park, I start by dragging and dropping a person who hates bugs onto a picnic blanket furthest away from a streetlight attracting mosquitos. Another person wants to sit by her, so I drag her over to a nearby spot. But now someone else is angry: The second person is listening to loud music, and a person snoozing nearby on the bench has been rudely awoken. This means reorganizing the scene over and over again until everyone is happy.
In a movie theater, several patrons are inexplicably wearing massive cowboy hats. No one wants to sit behind those people, nor does anyone want to sit near people using their phones. (Unfortunately, I can’t kick those jokers out!) Others want to be able to sneak popcorn from someone nearby, while others simply want to sit in the middle of the theater.
You replay each little scenario a few times before moving on to the next level, as people come and go from, say, the bus or movie theater. Once you’ve got the perfect seating chart, a person who forgot to shower may come wandering in — so you’ll have to switch people around to account for those who don’t want to sit near someone smelly.
The game moves through different, increasingly complex scenarios in separate stages broken into European cities, like London, Brussels, and Barcelona. Each has a little overarching narrative to it all, about one of the humanoid shapes following an actor from city to city. But the narrative is just a little part of what makes Is This Seat Taken? a real delight. The animations are silly, and the increasing demands of the people you’re seating are even sillier. It’s satisfying to click around playing matchmaker, moving stuff around until suddenly something clicks.
There are no timers, which makes Is This Seat Taken? a more chill version of the logic tests you may have taken during high school exams. Poti Poti Studios told me that the original idea for Is This Seat Taken? was simply to create a game about sorting people. They played with ideas, including scoring systems based on the speed at which a player solved a level. “But in the end, we found the game was more fun if we simplified the entire scoring system and let the player freely experiment with the characters without restrictions,” they said.
Removing the barriers to completion — you don’t have to find the right seat for everyone in a level — means reaching a larger audience: “We believe that some puzzle games struggle to reach a general audience because they tend to make levels that are too difficult, or end up making levels with too many concepts added one after the other,” the developers said. If you can’t find the right spot for someone, you can move on. The benefit for getting an entire level completed with 100% satisfaction for the people you’ve seated means unlocking an extra level.
All five cities in Is This Seat Taken? should take most people a couple hours to complete. There’s a bit of repetition to the game and across its levels, but it doesn’t feel grating or like unnecessary padding. It’s one of those games that I want more of, but appreciate for being a short, contained experience; more levels just for the sake of levels runs the risk of the repetition becoming a problem.
Is This Seat Taken? was previously available to play as a demo through the Steam Next Fest (and it’s still available for free now, too); the demo is just one city, Barcelona, but it’s a good taste of what Is This Seat Taken? Is. The full game was surprise released during Thursday’s Nintendo indie showcase for PC, Switch, and mobile.
