Following the beloved Australian indie darling Unpacking, Witch Beam’s newest game Tempopo feels comfortably familiar, yet radically different. Like Unpacking, Tempopo features cozy aesthetics and approachable gameplay, but differs with its focus on jovial puzzle solving and a far more vibrant attitude.

Tempopo is a fun and exciting adventure that brings a brilliant bubbly energy to the table. Its efficient simplicity makes the game easy to understand, and the puzzles are very satisfying to resolve. However, its straightforward nature also feels like a limitation. In many ways, Tempopo is too simplistic, failing to bring interesting elements to stand out from other puzzle games. Combined with several smaller design issues, Tempopo doesn’t quite reach the ideal puzzler experience.

A Tempopo for all seasons

Tempopo places players in the shoes of Hana, a young fairy who conducts musical flowers to create harmonious melodies. When disaster strikes, Hana and the Tempopo (adorable pink blobs) must collect the flowers scattered across several blocky sky islands. Hana’s flower quest is simplistic, yet frames gameplay effectively while making flower collecting surprisingly rewarding.

Hana collects flowers by conducting the Tempopo through these islands. Tempopo move automatically to the beat, but the player can guide the Tempopo by placing powerups on the level. Abilities see Tempopo change direction, break and kick blocks, or even transform into fans and cubes.

Tempopo’s biggest strength is its simplistic design. It’s incredibly easy to get a feel for how the abilities work and where to use them. The game does a lovely job of easing you into each puzzle, letting you toy with the mechanics in smaller spaces. An Adventure Mode is also included, which restricts where the player can place powers to reduce difficulty. These features, combined with the adorable graphics, make Tempopo a great game to share with young children. Puzzles are also easy to grasp, thanks to Tempopo’s accessibility. It’s been built from the ground up to appeal to many players, thanks to basic two-button controls and clever visual design. I’m quite fond of the hint feature, which nudges players in the right direction without solving the entire puzzle.

Seasonal changes also bring new flowers, each mimicking a different instrument. The player plants collected flowers in Hana’s garden, where they hum various notes depending on their placement. Each season ends with a sequence where the flowers sing together, a great way to cap off the world. It’s especially commendable how the sequence harmonises while adhering to wherever the player has planted their flowers.

While the presentation is mostly exceptional, the lack of features designed to deal with complex levels is frustrating. It’s easy to lose the placement of Tempopo or enemies with all the walls. The game fares slightly better with flowers by highlighting them through blocks, but it’s so subtle that it’s still easy to lose their location. Additionally, flowers don’t stand out enough within these nature-heavy environments, which is annoying when they’re vital to finishing levels.

Perhaps the worst offender is the camera, which always anchors to the exact centre of every level. While the player can zoom and rotate the camera, frankly, it’s not enough control for the jagged formation of later levels. I understand Witch Beam wants to keep controls simplistic, but this decision sacrifices visual clarity. There are several levels where I can’t get an ideal perspective, or struggle to follow the marching Tempopo due to awkward angles.

Gardens of Mischief and Melody

The puzzles of Tempopo start off very basic, and take quite a while to become interesting, as the difficulty curve intends to ease players in. It definitely achieves this, but it also means a fair chunk of levels goes by too quickly without much thought. Once things pick up, there’s a consistent quality to every level, which rides all the way to the finale. The later levels are very rewarding to solve, especially as Tempopo continually delivers small twists on existing powers.

The difficulty in these later levels feels fair yet challenging. I’d have to stop and think for a while in the game’s second half, although there’d still be a strangely easy level on occasion. Difficulty is subjective, and your mileage may vary, but I appreciate that the later worlds were able to challenge me without feeling overly frustrating. However, one particular issue that kept propping up is how some blocks are clearly telegraphed for powers. I wish the visual clues had remained in the game’s restrictive adventure mode, as it limits experimentation and highlights the solution very quickly.

Between the glitches and camera struggles, I found myself replaying level solutions frequently. This highlighted how repetitive the marching sequences become when experimenting with complex solutions. Some extra features could’ve been included to alleviate this. It would’ve been nice to have some sort of “onion skinning” feature, where the game shows a Tempopo’s position on each beat of the song before playing. I also think it should provide some visual indicator for exactly how long a cube or fan transformation is supposed to last.

A more simplistic solution would be a double-speed toggle to move past the early stages of a march that you’ll see dozens of times. It’s possible these features were excluded to maintain a simplistic design, but their absence emphasised how repetitive the marching sequences get, especially on the very large levels. As Tempopo requires remembering the location of friends and foes on every beat, it should provide some features to help track this information.