Semispheres Reviews

Semispheres is a lightweight puzzler with some clever ideas. You need to guide a pair of jellyfish to their respective goals in parallel versions of a level, one with each stick on a controller. (You can also play on a keyboard, I guess. It probably works OK.) In your way are guards with stealth-game vision cones that send a jellyfish back to its starting point. The setup sounds like it could result in a thumb-twisting dexterity challenge, but that's not what this game is. Just a handful of puzzles ever ask you to move both sides simultaneously. Mostly you're concerned with using tools and points of cross-side interaction to have the jellyfish help each other past the guards. A simple example: noise-makers attract any guard within a limited range. Portals are spots where any tools used affect the opposite side of the level. So: stand on a portal and use a noise-maker to move a guard that was blocking your path on the other side. It gets trickier than that, of course. Most of the late-game puzzles revolve around a point-to-point teleporter mechanic, and tools that allow you to move one side of the teleporter. Being able to rewire the structure of a level is a powerful base for puzzles, and Semispheres uses it well. One odd point that doesn't really add or detract: each set of puzzles unlocks part of a wordless comic about a kid and a robot. It doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the game, and I'm not sure why it was included. It's fine though, very cute.

Straightforward puzzler with an interesting idea and decent execution. This game is a bit above adequate in most respects: nice graphics, nice sound, nice puzzles. But, outside of the actual idea for the main mechanic, nothing stood out as particularly stellar. None of the puzzles were particularly complicated or required much coordination or timing. Only a few puzzles hinted at the sort of complications they *should* have been building toward. They introduced some fun mechanics, but didn't do too much with them. I finished the game in about 2 hours, without getting the hidden achievement, which seems to have something to do with finishing the game quickly. As it stands, there's not much motivation for replaying any of the levels. The puzzles themselves are pretty straightforward, and when you start a new game there doesn't seem to be any way to go back to specific levels, you just have to play through it all again. A little extra work could have pushed this game from good to great: some bigger, more convoluted levels (maybe with multiple solutions), the ability to go back and try to optimize your solution times for each level individually, and a level editor. As it stands, I definitely wouldn't recommend at full price ($10), but would feel very comfortable recommending for $1-2 (currently it's on sale for $1). 6/10

This is a great puzzle game. Not too long (took me less than 3 hours to beat) but the levels felt good and never too difficult or too big to enjoy them. I totally recommend it to puzzle lovers. It is really better played with a controller since each analog joystick is used to control a character

A short, but beautiful puzzle game with an unique split-screen mechanic and a touching, heartwarming story. Played with a keyboard, without a controller, but that didn't seem to hurt the experience in the slightest. On a side note: a bit disappointingly, situations where you have to control both... glowy balls at the same time happen all too rarely - most of the time you can complete the level by focusing on just one of them at the time. Still, the few times it happens it presents quite an interesting and unique challenge. :3

The game system is unique, so it was fun at first. I personally didn't enjoy it much because the action elements are less than expected and it's pure puzzle I gave up playing because I couldn't solve the puzzles. If you like puzzle games, this would be fun.

Tight little puzzler. Levels are tough, but fair. The control scheme lends itself really well to a split-brain theme, which can get pretty hard. There's not much of a story, but that's ok. It's just good puzzles and vibes. See all my reviews at [url=https://david.reviews/]david.reviews[/url]

I'm on the fence with this one. For the amount spent both cost and time wise it wasn't bad, and the gameplay wasn't bad, but it was much much easier than I was expecting. You very rarely need to control both sides simultaneously unless you wanna complete it faster, and that's what I was wanting from this game. There were like... 2..? levels that required it. All other times it was just move one, then the other, then back to the first one, until finish. The 'story' wasn't very engaging and was very disconnected from the game. Didn't need to be there at all really. The puzzles themselves were simple, only a few requiring any time to think about them beyond the initial glance at the level structure; but it was gentle and relaxing. On a sale, if you're looking for something to play for an hour that's kinda nice to look at and peaceful, this could be good. Just didn't quite live up to my expectations going in.

I enjoyed playing Semipheres. It features 50+ levels of mainly logical puzzles that are centered around controlling two balls on separate fields with the same architecture and making use of the items that are available on each field so that each ball can reach its exit. There are five basic game mechanics that you can use to manipulate the surroundings. The combination of these mechanics generally provides for interesting problems but even though I had fun playing the levels, there is one major downside: in my opinion the learning curve is just to flat which sort of makes the levels too easy to solve. I finished the game with all achievements in less than three hours which means that average solving time for each puzzle was around three minutes. So I can't help but think that there could have been a much bigger amount of more challenging puzzles. Don't get me wrong, in each puzzle you have to find out first what to do. But in most puzzles it's just not that diffcult to figure out and then to implement. I recall only three puzzles that really challenged me because of the amount and positioning of available items. In most puzzles the options you have quite clearly indicate what you have to do. So while I recommend this game as a nice simplistic puzzler I also have to mention that I think it is not worth more than 5€/$.

This is an excellent puzzler with a very enjoyable meditative soundtrack (the music and atmosphere reminds me particularly of OSMOS). I found it to be very well paced, with the new mechanics building nicely level over level. Some of the more difficult levels consistently mess with my brain. Puzzle/Stealth fans should abosolutely check this out. I know the dev, have watched this game develop, and played it multiple times at various public demos. It is truly a must play for me and should be a must play for any puzzle game aficionado!

[h1]It's pretty good, worth the price[/h1]Deserves more love from fans of abstract puzzley/stealth stuff. [b]**I don't think it would be any fun without a proper controller (with 2 joysticks).[/b] Each level is split vertically into 2 halves, as you can see from the store screenshots. You control 2 spheres (jellyfish?) simultaneously, and need to get each to the exit on their side of the board. For most levels, you can usually split up the task to work on one side at a time, alternating back and forth, but there are definitely levels that require active, simultaneous control of both spheres. Thus, I wouldn't fully agree with [u][url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/JimDeadlock/recommended/448800/]JimDeadlock's Review[/url][/u] that it's "a puzzler through and through," since quite a few levels really do require "timing and dexterity." The puzzley elements generally rely on how you use a sphere on one side of the board (e.g., left) to grab and use pickups that can influence the other side (e.g., right) and manipulate pitfalls. The main pitfalls are little sentinels whose line-of-sight-cones you need to avoid. If one of your spheres does get spotted by a sentinel, the sphere goes back to where it started -- which is actually used as part of the solution in a few levels. So, for example, one of the pickups lets you send out a sort of sound-wave that distracts sentinels. If your left-sphere has this pickup and is standing in a "window" to the right side of the board, your left-sphere can clear a path on the right side to help your right-sphere through. Another pickup lets you open up "windows" in the first place. And so on. You can see how levels get complicated as you need to plan out the order in which to pick up and deploy pickups, on both sides of the board. (Each sphere can only carry 1 pickup at a time, and they're all single-use, but then re-spawn on the board where you found them). There are 54ish levels, and while many of them offer a slow learning curve to learn new mechanics, the tougher ones can get pretty mind-bending as you work them out on the first playthrough. I think my first playthrough was ~2.5h total. Once you crack each level, they aren't too bad in retrospect, and so the 1 achievement you won't get in a normal playthrough (a speedrun achievement for beating the game in <35minutes in 1 sitting), is quite possible, though it took me a few tries -- especially since once you beat the last level, the game resets. No opportunity to practice the tough ones individually :( There's supposed to be a story. [u][url=https://steamcommunity.com/app/448800/discussions/0/1742265315847072018/#c1742265730176701358]I couldn't find it[/url][/u], but the user screenshots show that it does exist, so Idunno what happened in my case -- I doubt I missed much. The [u][url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1980781820]Settings/Options[/url] [/u]are a bit more filled out than in many games at the same price-point, and at time of writing, the Dev is active in the forums -- more than I can say for a lot of games, sadly.