Game: Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor
Genre: Puzzle
System: Steam (Windows, macOS)
Developer|Publisher: Joel Page | Turn Da Page
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $3.99 | UK £3.39 | EU € 3,99
Release Date: March 1st, 2024
A review code was provided, with many thanks to Turn Da Page.
Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor is a short puzzle game. You are a unicorn that spreads light where you step, and there are dance floors that need that light.
The Gameplay of Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor
Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor is a movement-only game where you just need to step on each of the tiles to light up the floor. With each level, you can earn rainbow cookies, which can be spent in the store on new mane and tail colors, hats, and glasses.
It has a very cartoony, hand-drawn kind of look, and you need to move through each progressively more difficult level to get to the next. There does not appear to be any hint or help or skip level buttons to help out. Since there isn’t really a story to Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor, and the gameplay is very simple, let’s move on to what it’s like to play.
The Cons of Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor
It’s pretty easy to tell when someone is making a first game. There are usually a lot of tell-tale glitches and missed things that just point to someone trying to make a whole new game from scratch for the first time. No matter the size of your development team or how long you have been playing video games, making a game is incredibly difficult.
That being said, Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor is beyond what is even acceptable for a new development studio. I have reviewed many first-time-dev games, from Hakuna to Lucy Dreaming, and so many of them, even with their little flaws and problems, are beautiful and fun experiences. But Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor‘s premise is so simple that even the smallest mistakes are amplified, making it challenging to enjoy.
I know that making games is hard, the artwork is hard, and getting playtesters can be hard as well. But Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor doesn’t feel like anyone really put any thought into what this game would be like to play outside of the devs and maybe their family members. There are tons of weird glitches, like the level above, that wasn’t complete but told me I had won somehow.
And look at the screenshot below; you can’t see where the bird (which moves exactly as you move the unicorn) needs to go to complete the level. I tried changing the aspect ratio and moving the board around, but you just can’t get a good look at what the board the bird is on looks like.
The music is repetitive and a little abrasive, and the movement is unpredictable. Sometimes, when you click on the screen, your unicorn doesn’t always move how you want it to. When I pressed F12, the game brought up development tools instead of taking a screenshot like it was supposed to. I feel bad having to lay it out like this on an indie project that someone clearly put a lot of time and effort into, but Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor is not a complete game.
Conclusion
Sippy Disco: Light Up the Dance Floor is a colorful, cute puzzle game with some good ideas. The puzzles started easy, but got really hard very quickly. But there is just so much incomplete about Sippy that it feels like a prototype. I like the basic structure, and I like the puzzles, but I’m afraid this game is not worth picking up.
Final Verdict: I Don’t Like It
