Is This Seat Taken? review: "I can't believe organizing seating charts can be this charming"

I can tell you one thing about Is This Seat Taken? for certain: if school exams were as charming as this, they'd have been a lot less frightening. This game from Poti Poti Studio is all about finding the right seats for cute little shapes and solving logic puzzles – all with fantastically designed visuals that make them truly engaging.

You know the type of logic puzzles I mean. Think the cast of Sonic are driving out to the lake for a vacation but Shadow won't sit next to Sonic, but also Knuckles wants to share his ant treats with Shadow. It's the crux of the devious Jindosh lock puzzle in Dishonored 2. Or even sudoku for that matter. They can be especially devious because they ask you to puzzle out, Clue-like, a tight solution by weaving through a whole host of limitations.

Seating plan

Is This Seat Taken? immediately removes the initial stress of having to visualize a logic puzzle in your head or with gridded note paper by presenting each seating dilemma visually on screen with incredibly clear and appealing imagery. Hovering the cursor over each shape tells you more about their desires, and picking them up and plopping them down feels wonderfully responsive to do, from the pop as you place them to the way they dangle as you move across the screen.

What that also means is Is This Seat Taken? has the freedom to add a large variety of situations without becoming overwhelming, and to gradually up the ante over the course of puzzling through each location. Every spot has multiple puzzle steps to complete – for instance, the bus puzzle type unloads passengers at each stop while a fresh batch waits to board.

You then have to reshuffle your placed shapes around to accommodate the new ones, usually with margin for error decreasing with each step. Where you may easily have been able to balance groups who want to chatter with those wanting to snooze or concentrate on reading a book in the bus' first outing, you could end up with even more yappers or nappers who have trouble crossing over by the final bus route – forcing you to rethink your earlier solutions.

Similarly, more and more complications arise, often related to the scenario in question. Within the cinema for instance, some troublemakers may want to use their phone, annoying other shapes. On a boat, some may want to be by the sides to take photos, while others want to be seated in the middle to avoid splashback. A handful of levels allow you to change the environment as well, such as turning air conditioning units on and off – though while some need to be cooled down, others hate the chill. But what if one of each type wants to sit together? Agh!

Everyone deserves a seat at the table as well, meaning that even though I'd personally tell those addicted to their phones to take a hike from my film premier, you have to make sure they're all present and accounted for. Plenty affect the space around them as well, from eating really smelly cheese nachos which may turn the stomach of others at a football game, to simply wearing too much cologne that it can be sniffed for a fair few tiles around them.

Even with the negative effects, dangling a cologne-heavy shape across the map will highlight in blue how far their smell will carry. You always have more than enough information to avoid knowing what's required ever becoming an issue. Similarly, many shapes have little shorthands on their icon to indicate their most important details, like a little speech bubble for the chatty ones, or a sweat icon for those yearning for A/C.

Given how easy it is to drag and drop each shape, no puzzle frustrates for too long, even though some later levels can get quite tricky. Whether it's juggling some characters who explicitly don't want to sit next to each other, or grouping up tables based on food preferences at a wedding, Is This Seat Taken? always feels incredibly responsive.

For the most part, Is This Seat Taken? remains inventive throughout its snappy runtime. Following the journey of Nat, a rhombus who wants to be an actor despite feeling out of place, is reason enough to hop from city to city as you play through each level, scooping up stars for satisfying the soon-to-be-seated – and the lightweight story is heartwarming enough.

Some puzzle types can become a bit repetitive even if different cities have slightly different rules – trains for instance remain fairly similar even if only some incorporate air conditioning. Also, while I appreciate the classroom levels for offering inversions to a lot of rules – for instance here chatter must not be placed together or they'll be too distracted – it feels less engaging to me than leaning into rules. Maybe that's something I need to bring up with my therapist, though.

Still, even including the bonus puzzles unlocked by maxing out each city, I did find myself wanting a bit more variety. As different as some locations maybe be, they often still boil down to dealing with the same core puzzle pieces, and I felt a little bit done with some problems before hitting credits. Even so, collecting all the stars has been a great time, and in terms of visuals and the satisfaction of shuffling pieces into the correct order, Is This Seat Taken? is a marvelously polished puzzle game.

I finally tried Minami Lane after seeing over 5,000 positive reviews, and within 4 hours it's already the chillest management game I've ever played