PAX Aus 2022 Highlight – Tempopo

It’s become a PAX Aus tradition that I mildly embarrass myself at the Witch Beam booth. I tried and failed to put a potato peeler in the bathroom (don’t ask) in the Unpacking demo in 2019. Next, in 2022, I struggled to clear one of the final demo levels in their upcoming puzzle game Tempopo, even after lead designer Sanatana Mishra pointed the solution out to me. Literally pointed, and I still missed it. As it turned out, I needed to turn the camera to see a piece I missed.

Tempopo is a puzzle game in which you direct creatures that look like little flower buds to collect objects on the way to the exit of each level. The creatures move on their own, and it’s up to you to place limited objects and traps around the level to direct them where they need, lest they adorably beeline off a cliff. You can reset a level at any time to rethink your choices, then press play and see your mini adventure play out. It’s a cute premise, and there’s a lot of variety to the puzzles. But the most striking thing about Tempopo is the music; every step the creatures take is to a rhythm, and every object you place generates melodies that change depending on the choices you make. The game is still in development so there are unfortunately no publicly available videos yet, but it’s much more impressive to see and hear than read.

“Myself and Seiji (Tanaka) came up with the core concept,” said Mishra. “It started as a side project a couple of years ago, which we tinkered on in our spare time. After we shipped Unpacking, we decided, ‘well, now we have the resources and time, let’s start to ramp it up a bit.’ It was a part-time side project for a while, but now it’s a proper in-production game.”

Tempopo co-creator Seiji Tanaka is perhaps best known for working on 2012’s Journey, on which he was an animator. Rounding out the team are Unpacking technical director Tim Dawson and sound designer extraordinaire Jeff van Dyck, who had an obvious hand in Tempopo’s music-based elements. I asked Mishra if music was part of the initial concepts of the game. 

“In the earliest stages, Seiji and I were like, ‘what game can we build and finish in two days?’ Everything evolved from there, and we completely scrapped whatever version of the game that was. Then we turned to Jeff and said ‘we’re making a puzzle game, how about we come up with some concepts together?’”