Here’s a great puzzle game about one of life’s little anxieties

When you ride the bus, do you prefer a window seat, or do you like to stand? At the movies, are you a “middle of the middle” purist, like me? Do you position yourself aisle-side for a quick exit, or down the front for maximum immersion? A few days ago I got a great seat for a French heist movie (it was Rififi, Letterboxd-heads), but then a tall guy sat in front of me and I had to keep craning my neck or leaning to the side to read the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. So annoying!

Where you sit matters. Let’s be honest, we all have our preferences, and we all care about them deeply — perhaps too deeply. Throw enough persnickety humans together and seating becomes a social minefield. Have you ever tried to make a seating plan for a wedding? It’s a nightmare.

But, in the cute logic puzzle game Is This Seat Taken?, it’s the fun kind of nightmare. This is the first game by Poti Poti Studio, and it has the chill, cosmopolitan vibe you’d expect from a game originating in Barcelona and Brussels. It’s a game about picking up cheerful little shape people, plonking them down in seating layouts, and fiddling about with the arrangements until everyone’s happy. There’s a demo available now that will feature in the upcoming Steam Next Fest, which runs from Feb. 24 to March 3; the game’s in development for PC and mobile.

The demo offers a series of Barcelona-set scenarios of escalating difficulty: a taxi, a stretch limo, a small cinema, a bus, an outdoor rock concert with table seating (hey, this is Barcelona) — and, if you get perfect star ratings on all of these, the ultimate challenge unlocks: the wedding. It’s all presented with impeccable graphic design in tasteful pastel colors, on a background of soothing sepia, and set to relaxing elevator jazz. The people are little, two-legged geometric shapes. Hover over one and a card pops up telling you their seating preferences, which might be “I want to sit next to my parent,” “I prefer to be alone,” “I forgot to shower” (a common oversight in this game’s world, apparently), “I do not like bad smells,” and so on.

Each scenario evolves over multiple stages, with new guests arriving and leaving, or new passengers boarding the bus. It’s never too hard to progress; there are no time limits or fail states, and Poti Poti is clearly aiming for maximum chill and approachability with this game. But it can get devilishly difficult to find that highest star rating as you try to balance the competing needs of your fussy little congregation. Each change has cascading effects on the tight layouts as you maneuver sleepers away from noisemakers, or people wearing too much cologne away from those who can’t stand the stuff. On the bus level, I kept pairing two people who like to chat, only for one of them to hop off and leave the other thinking, dejectedly, “Nobody listens to me.” At the wedding, a misanthrope who didn’t want to sit at the same table as anyone wearing elegant clothing became the bane of my life.

Getting it right, though, is just so satisfying: because solving logic puzzles feels good, and because we all know what it’s like not to be sat where we want. But if a giant hand came out of the sky and rearranged us all, would we really thank it?