‘Is This Seat Taken?’ Creates Puzzles From Seating Preferences

Is This Seat Taken? is a puzzle game where you need to help the shapes find the ideal spot despite their complex seating particularities.

I’ve seen quite a few, primarily mobile, puzzle games about sitting people in the right places. Normally, it’s something basic like color, but Is This Seat Taken? takes the idea of seat placement and adds complex requests from the various characters so that they get the seat they want. These seats aren’t just in cars, but also at venues during events and in the cinema.

The premise is pretty simple; you will have a bunch of people at the start of a level who have different wants or things they are doing. In the cinema, for example, some people are eating popcorn and will make a mess. On the bus, someone might have forgotten to shower and be a bit smelly. Sometimes, the people that need sitting are kids and some adults won’t want to sit near them.

These different requirements need fulfilling to get the most amount of thumbs up at the end of the level. Getting perfect scores can unlock more levels to keep playing in. It’s quite satisfying to plug people into the perfect places and see their faces light up!

Along with people having their own specific needs, there is also a story that follows through the levels. Is This Seat Taken? has little stories to the start of some of the levels, sometimes being a one-off showing the new location, and other times feeding into a larger story about an aspiring actor who is a little nervous and a little out of place. They’ve not seen actors who have had the same physical shape as them before. I found myself invested in their lives and wanted to see if they ended up making it to the big screen as well!

Is This Seat Taken? is currently in development, but in the meantime, you can grab the demo from Steam.

About The Author

Jupiter Hadley

Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist, writing for Metro UK, Big Boss Battle, AlphaBetaGamer, and many more, all with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, judges many jams and events.