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Sephonie is a new, bizarre 3D puzzle-platformer game, which according to the description (since it’s quite concise), allows you to “parkour through an island’s massive cave network. You’ll take on platforming challenges in lush caverns, subterranean oceans, and surreal cityscapes as you guide three biologists through the shifting spiritual landscape of the island depths!”
So, one of the great things about this is how you’re jumping around landscapes which all looks quite superb, but with lots of deaths, and finding myself constantly going the wrong way and getting stuck trying to do something impossible – which I later had confirmed on that full walkthrough (since I had to check) – it just stopped being fun for me sooner than I’d have liked.
And when you fall off platforms into the abyss, that happens a lot! That’s fun for a brief time, but after a long time, it becomes irritating. If you want to stick with it, make sure you save at the checkpoints, and do this often. There’s plenty of them about, so no reason not to do so. However, I found you don’t actually need to press the button (triangle on PS5) in order to do this, just walk past one. I found that out when I’d saved at a later one when trying to complete the section which takes me up to the Bronchial Anemone Thraskias (you’ll see this in my 4th gameplay video), missed a jump, headed all the way down to the bottom, and as I went to top myself so that I thought I would respawn at the later checkpoint, I didn’t because I’d inadvertently walked past one lower down. So, I had to get back up there again. Not a major bigger once I’d figured out how to climb up there, but it did mean that my gameplay video meant for an awful lot of editing, so you didn’t keep seeing me repeat the same sections over and over.
When it does come to the puzzle part of this, it’s a weird Tetris-type game, which gets old quickly. You can see this one my gameplay videos, the first “Onyx link” coming seven minutes into the first video.
I played Sephonie for about 3 hours, which edited down into the 4 videos you see, but while it does go on for a fair bit longer – from what I can see from a full walkthrough, from when it came out on PC in April 2022 – what I’ve experienced is enough, since it’s very repetitive. If you feel you can get invested with it in full, then go for it, but for me, I’ve seen all I need to see.
There’s also some bizarre post-puzzle video sequences, which just really didn’t make any sense, so I’m not sure what was going on there. It’s like some sort of ’70s concept album.
I also don’t really get WHY the puzzles are the way they are, and to complete them does seem incredibly random. I guess it must make sense to somebody, but to understand them to a degree, check out the gameplay footage.
The music is lovely, though.
Sephonie is out now on PC/Steam, PS5, PS4, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.