[b]7/10[/b]
A set-packing puzzle game with the most elegant UI I have ever seen. Beware! Very pricey for what the puzzles provide.
[b]What is it:[/b]
Art? Puzzles? The moment you start Sepapa, you can tell this game is different. A grey haze spreads out over your screen, it darkens with a small dot pulsating in the middle. Click on it and your mouse cursor transforms into a small glowing personage which becomes your avatar throughout the entire game. Move the mouse slowly and it walks, speed it up and Mister Glowy takes flight. Every action with your mouse is accompanied with a cute animation from mister glowy. The dev states, “Over time, the tech I used to build [Sepapu] evolved. This game is a 4 year, slow-cooking side project that at the end, became my main focus.” The tech is definitely on display here. I am accustomed to bare-bones puzzlers where every ounce of energy is instilled into the puzzles themselves. Sepapu is different. The storefront states the puzzle rules aren’t explicitly stated and must be inferred from interaction - this can also go for navigating the interface to find these puzzles. It took me much longer than expected just to figure out how to find and play a puzzle but the beautifully designed menu pulled me through the struggle. I spent about an hour just playing around with the menu, watching Mister Glowy fly around and pick up stuff. There is this pulsating energy that emanates from the borders of the start screen. As it moves over the background towards the center of the screen it looks like waves washing over a fine dune-like sand. If you hold down the left mouse button and move your character, you can draw images into this “sand” that slowly disappear. I don’t know what the dev did to make this interactive eye-candy, but gol-darn if the puzzles themselves were designed with the same love, I would need a new category to rank this game. This isn’t to say the puzzles were a wash.
[b]How hard is it:[/b] ★★☆☆☆. Easy to moderate - with a huge caveat that I can’t wait to unpack. The game says “set-packing” puzzles which I have never heard of before. The dev further describes these puzzles as similar to “8 Queen Puzzle” which only left me further confused. In my own words, you pick up tablets, each with their own characteristics, and place them on a grid so that each section of the grid is colored a dark grey. If the effects of more than one tablet take place over the same section, you’ve destroyed that section and must start over. You know what, I am going to stop here. Describing how the game functions almost seems like a disservice to the dev’s artistic vision. Understanding how everything works was probably the hardest part. There are 8 sections with new tablet types being introduced in each section until the end where all the tablet types are combined into what were supposed to be harder puzzles. What I experienced was something different. I found the puzzle difficulty to escalate nicely all the way through section 7. Once I entered section 8 and was asked to solve puzzles using all tablet types, everything felt a little easier. But before I dive into this section 8 caveat, I must also say that I noticed a pattern I’ve seen in other dev’s first commercial foray - some sections had a design flow where the first 5 or so puzzles are designed to introduce the new mechanic and test the players understanding of it, then suddenly the final 3 puzzles are used to introduce yet another mechanic. However it never really clicks because the intro puzzle is purposely simple to help the player understand the new mechanic, and the second puzzle amps the difficulty up only a little, with only one puzzle used to truly challenge the player’s intuition. It feels shoehorned in, never really presenting a challenge. I would prefer that both new mechanics were introduced in the first 1-3 puzzles, with 2 more puzzles stress-testing the players intuition, and the final 3 taking things to the max.
Now onto section 8. I was able to solve the final puzzle without using the intuition I had built up throughout the whole game. Some people may call this “brute-force”, but what I actually did was consult a database rich with geometrical knowledge i.e. I cheated. Now, you may be asking yourself why I decided to cheat. I chose to cheat because what the puzzle was asking me to solve did not require I draw from my “Sepapu” database and combine all its unique rules in a novel way, in other words, it didn’t require I think in a way that I’ve become addicted to with most puzzle games. It asked me to use only one of Sepapu’s basic rules in a geometrically complicated way. I felt like it suddenly wanted me to be a physicist, not a puzzler. It could have been an expert-level puzzle for the first section - not a puzzle to capstone the whole game. I went through the entire game, built up this understanding of the game’s unique world and didn’t use most of it to solve this final puzzle, as if I was being asked to solve something from a different game that just happened to share a similar base rule to Sepapu. The experience put “puzzle-solving” onto a new plane of analysis for me. If one without any experience playing your game (the database I consulted) can solve one of your most difficult puzzles, what kind of puzzle have you actually created? Most importantly, what kind of experience have you set your players up to have?
Luckily, for Sepapu, it was only 2 of the total 64 puzzles that missed the mark, and, as the dev stated, “I studied puzzle design from some people I really admire. While I am nowhere near as skilled as those people, I think I was able to execute some good ideas,” I can say you did. The reason these final levels caused such a juxtaposition was because everything leading up to them was so well designed. So I guess it wasn’t luck. Dev, you made a visually stunning game with 62 puzzles that show you have what it takes to make something equally intellectually stunning. I hear you have plans post-launch for Sepapu - I cannot wait to see what they are.
[b]How long is it:[/b] 64 levels, divided between 8 sections, the first 7 of which introduce a tablet with a unique mechanic. Took me a little less than 5 hrs to complete. Other people less distracted by beautiful UI could do it in half that.
[b]Level design:[/b] See “How hard is it”
[b]Quality:[/b] Just one thing - I would love the game to have a way to exit built into it. During my playthrough I closed the game by alt-tab force-shutting it down. Maybe this functionality actually exists as the game’s ultimate puzzle - behind a myriad of menu curtains that only those called by the puzzling gods can solve.
[b]Worth the price:[/b] No. And I am being very intentional here. As of July 28th, 2026, the game is 12 USD. I have spent 100+ hours of puzzling amazingness on cheaper games. Only pay full price if you [b]value supporting indie games[/b] and would like to experience [b]the unadulterated vision of a fledgling solo puzzle dev[/b] - before the weight of reality inevitably forces compromise. If you are a puzzle addict that needs hours upon hours of hard-as-nails puzzling fun - [b]wait for a discount[/b]. I would say that the pure puzzle to price ratio here is about 3-5 USD.
[quote]For more puzzle game reviews, news and everything puzzle-related, follow [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/25928931-Puzzle-Lovers/]Puzzle Lovers[/url] and check out our [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/puzzlelovers]Steam group[/url].[/quote]
