Feeling like a glorious unicorn on the dancefloor is not a vibe I’ve often felt in life so I was intrigued to see how Sippy Disco would work as a puzzle game. The aim is simple, move Sippy the Unicorn around the dancefloor grid and light up the floor you step on. Whilst there is some fun theming here, there are some strange design decisions that didn’t really click with me.
Sippy Disco comes with 50 levels but with the most up and down difficulty level I’ve experienced in a game for quite some time. The game has two difficulty levels built in. Firstly, you’ll just need to turn on all the dancefloor to proceed and this is almost always dead easy to do. However, each level gives you a percentage score which decreases as you walk back over dancefloor you’ve already lit up. So the most casual among you will just complete the game but more puzzling purists will aim for getting 100% efficiency for each level.
There are a couple of simple gameplay mechanics which the game introduces. You’ll have pressure pads to lay hidden floor, on/off switches that turn the floor on or off depending on which way its switching and disco balls you can push around too. However the best and most interesting part of the game is the Parrot. The Parrot follows your movement and is usually trapped in a separate part of the single screen level and its often full of switches. The idea is that you’ll need to turn both your floor and the Parrot’s floor on too and these are the best and most rewarding levels in the whole game.
I did run into a few quirky issues though. Whenever you restart a level, you have to exit out to the main menu and go to level select. Then you’ll notice the level you was on isn’t there – the game takes you back to the previous level which you’ll need to complete again before you can get back to where you were. This wouldn’t be terrible if the reason I was restarting a level was largely because I kept walking into floor that didn’t exist because it needs a pressure pad to raise it. This might sound silly but the outline of the grid is really thin and I kept filling in the gaps with my eyes. This might be a me thing, rather than a graphical design thing but it kept happening to me. What wasn’t me was that some levels cut off at the bottom when you play the game at full screen. The game also then crams in a story for the last few levels (all of which are some of the easiest in the game) from absolutely nowhere and it feels tacked on and insincere as a result. The end result is a bit of a weird “huh?!” when the game ends, although I must give a shout out to the camp 80s pop song that plays out over the end credits. It’s camp as Eurovision.
Its difficult to recommend Sippy Disco because although I love the theming and the idea around it, its execution is very lopsided and full of odd design choices. A few patches would bump the score up a bit but this is a very easy game that you can clear in under an hour and not really realise you’d played it. It is the development teams first game and I think that shows in its pacing and design choices. For fans of unicorns and easy puzzle games only.
Review copy provided by developer. Out now on Steam.
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