Tempopo is just lovely. It’s a rare puzzle game with a strong sense of identity and place, that immediately wraps you in a simple, charming story to introduce the main attraction: tight, well-designed musical puzzles that demand your brain matter.
In Tempopo, the stakes are high. In fact, it’s the end of the world. All around you, your kingdom of gardens is crumbling, and the only way to reverse the degradation is to save the flowers hiding on isolated land masses. But you can’t just collect those wayward flowers. You must send your little Tempopo (pink blobs) on musical obstacle courses to retrieve those flowers, inputting commands to send them up, left, right, down, or to make them push, fly, blockify, or smash.
Visually, I related Tempopo most to Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker, if only for its shared cubical exploration. But Tempopo is unlike other games I’ve played. Its puzzles, and even its tone, feel entirely unique, buoyed by a cleverness that often stumped me.
You may tackle its many challenges in one of two modes. The first is a free-for-all mode where you need to figure out where to place action blocks to guide your Tempopo, with no clues about block placement or hints at progress.
The second mode gives you spaces where your blocks should go, allowing you to more easier identify the flow of Tempopo, and where it should be interrupted. There’s still a fair amount of challenge in this mode, but it gives you a leg up when the complexity of the game becomes too much.
I was confident in my approach for the first two (of four) seasons in the game. With a focus on rhythm, and slowly watching each Tempopo’s progress, you can puzzle your way through each stage, and figure out when and where each little blob is supposed to be, at the right time. But once the game introduces verticality, and extra blobs, it becomes very difficult to watch progress and figure out where to intervene.
Nothing I did was going right. I would watch the Tempopo, track their movements, listen to the game’s marvellous, boppy Jeff van Dyck soundtrack, and attempt to intervene in the dance with a smash action, or a blob action. So many times, I watched my blobs accidentally crush their friends to bits, or jump off a platform with a flower in tow, or head straight into the maw of a snapping skeleton. Poor little blobs.
Partway into knuckling through the game’s many challenges, I decided to switch on the easier adventure mode – and I found a much more enjoyable, pleasant ride awaiting. Here, the game lets you settle your brain and experiment more with simple tile placement, running through tracks by testing actions, one at a time. You’ll start your run with a limited number of actions, so there’s only a handful of possible sequences you can create.
Read: Tiny Garden review – A cosy sim with a surprising amount of strategy
It was the mix of both modes that allowed me to breeze through Tempopo, enjoying its cutesy vibes without knocking my head against a wall. I would start a level with high hopes, tap my toes and bop with the beat, and when my attempts at making music failed, and I was tired of watching my blobs fall to their unfortunate deaths, I would switch over to adventure mode, and listen to the flowers sing.
While there was a theme of giving up in my playthrough, trialling both modes let me see the grand scope of Tempopo, and just how much complexity is hiding beneath its relatively simple surface. You might look at screenshots and see a bright, colourful game of flowers and beauty. But the systems working away behind the scenes, and how the game’s musical puzzles play out, are awesome (in the truest sense).
Each tiny Tempopo moves to a beat, and with each beat, your garden stage moves. It’s not simply a matter of placing one action in one tile, and having your blob fulfil that command. In many stages, there’s also other moving parts to contend with – including those aforementioned snapping skulls. Like Tempopo, they move to the beat. Your instinct might be to trap them with a temporary blob Tempopo, but you often need them to move, to cut away vines in your path.
In some stages, you’ll need a distinct cavalcade of actions to happen, before you’re able to rescue each flower, and make it out alive. You must leave the skull to snap the vines, then guide it off the edge of a map. Or you must break the vines yourself to allow another Tempopo to get through. In that case, you’ll need a sequence where a blob becomes a block, and another blob pushes that block (possibly with a blob riding it) to crush vines and/or cross a gap.
In other stages, you’ll also need one blob to push another blob across a gap, or to sacrifice one to save another. Everything here is orderly, and that requires a great degree of understanding – or experimentation – to pull off successfully.
The final two seasons are riddled with difficulties. Stages where you must push and block and smash, and avoid skulls, and turn left or right to aid the flow. In some of these cases, the pursuit of completion is maddening. You’ll think yourself in circles trying to find your way out, trying to find some solution that’ll let you keep all your flowers, even if a few blobs end up in a ditch.
But even in my moments of desperation, I was thinking about just how cool Tempopo is, and how much thought has gone into its design. I first got hands-on with this title at PAX Aus 2022, and since then, it’s clearly changed and grown significantly. It’s retained the same brain-tickling vibes, and a pure and wonderful aesthetic, but it’s also benefitted from layers of development, and an expansion of its scope.
Even with these changes, the core hook remains the same. Tempopo is a game defined by its unique, well-designed musical puzzles, and by how it tests you. While simple on the surface, it’s an iceberg underneath, and you’ll keep coming back for more to see just how far it goes.
With a kindly approach to failure, and many options to help you along, getting stuck is no trouble, at least. You can jump into this game in bite-sized sessions, stretch your mind muscles, and pop back out again. With time and distance, even the game’s more layered puzzles can be parsed, as long as you have the patience to see your journey through.
The fate of the world depends on your grace. So pick up your tiny pink blobs, listen out for that tempting beat, and put your best foot forward. With the music flowing, and the world on your back, Tempopo is a charming little experience.
Three-and-a-half stars: ★★★½
Tempopo
Platform(s): PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S,
Developer: Witch Beam Games
Publisher: CULT Games
Release Date: 18 April 2025
A PC code for Tempopo was provided by the publisher and played on a Steam Deck for the purposes of this review. GamesHub reviews are rated on a ten-point scale.
