Are you stressed? I am a little stressed. Woo… things are a little stressful.
But when life serves me a week where I feel like I’m on The Pitt, the last thing I personally want to do is vibe. Which means I rarely turn to cozy games for cozy comfort; in times of chaos, I require a challenge to offset the challenges of life. Most of the genre often feels too sleepy.
Thankfully, Tempopo lands right in a sweet spot of brainy and chill. It’s my ideal cozy game. The latest from Unpacking developer Witch Beam is a musical puzzle game in which players lead adorable radish-like creatures to safety through 3D mazes. There’s a very loose story: Hana, a gifted musician, has lost her musical flowers in a series of sky islands, and her magical pals are the only ones with the abilities to collect them all.
Not to be confused with Tampopo, the best movie about ramen ever made, Tempopo is a bit like a Zen garden for Toad’s Treasure Tracker fiends, emphasizing organization and precision to solve puzzles that are juuuuust difficult enough, but not too bad. No notebooks required for those of us coming down from Blue Prince.
Each map in Tempopo arranges a varying number of tempopo, collectible flowers, and various perils. Like programmable robot toys, players issue a series of commands that help the tempopo change direction at the right time or overcome obstacles. To get over a chasm, one tempopo might need to transform itself into a block at one second, while another will leap up to the next level using a helicopter leaf, Totoro style. All the commands are given at the top of a round, and nailing the order and timing usually demands a few test runs. Tempopo is the absolute best game to play with a kid who you hope makes the wise decision to pursue computer science.
Tempopo’s 60 puzzles are recommendable in their own right, but composer Jeff van Dyck takes the experience to another level with the soundtrack. Witch Beam nailed the mood and mechanics in Unpacking, and Tempopo continues to the streak — this is a game full of bops. As I sat contemplating my next set of orders for the tempopos, I could feel myself grooving along to the music, which ranges from vibrant synth mixes to at least one pop track that made my millennial brain ask, “Is this Frou Frou?”
After collecting a handful of flowers for Hana, Tempopo transports you to her garden to take a break and replace gamer thumb with green thumb. There isn’t a ton to “unlock” in this game, but replanting the lost flowers opens up its own musical experience that feels as dreamy and enriching as the gameplay itself.
Tempopo is firmly in the cozy category thanks to its bubbly art and lo-fi sounds, but the puzzling feels closer to The Incredible Machine or Lemmings than the blissed-out emotional roller coaster of Unpacking. At my most stressed, it was exactly what I wanted to focus on for just a few hours.
Tempopo was released on April 17 to Steam, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
