Semispheres

This is an excellent puzzler with a very enjoyable meditative soundtrack (the music and atmosphere reminds me particularly of OSMOS).
I found it to be very well paced, with the new mechanics building nicely level over level. Some of the more difficult levels consistently mess with my brain.
Puzzle/Stealth fans should abosolutely check this out. I know the dev, have watched this game develop, and played it multiple times at various public demos. It is truly a must play for me and should be a must play for any puzzle game aficionado!

If you take a brief glance at a video for this you may think it's all about timing and dexterity but it's nothing of the sort. This is a puzzler through and through.
You have two rooms: orange on the left, blue on the right, with a jellyfish in each. The two rooms are usually identical, sometimes there is a small difference. Using your left and right controller sticks, you have to move both of your jellyfish to the exit portals at the opposite ends of the rooms. Doorways are guarded by sentinels with vision arcs, and if one of your jellyfish gets caught by an arc he's zapped back to his starting position.
Placed at strategic points around the rooms are powerups. Each jellyfish can collect one at a time and use them to solve the puzzle. In the vast majority of levels the powerups are used to help the opposite jellyfish, so you mostly only need to control one at a time to complete the puzzle in sections.
The most prominent powerup opens a circular portal to the other side, so a common solution is to place a portal in an area where there's a sentinel nearby on the opposite site, then go and collect a 'summoning bell' powerup and use it to call the sentinel away, allowing the other jellyfish to sneak past. Other powerups include switching one (or both) jellyfish to the opposite side; transporting sentinels to the other side; setting quick-transport lines to convenient locations in the other room.
There are a small number of levels where you have to use a bit of dexterity to move both jellyfish swiftly and simultaneously to get past sentinels before they return, but generally you can play at your own pace and deal with one jellyfish at a time. It doesn't require the reflexes of a housefly by any means.
Level overview is rather nice, you move your 2 jellyfish to the portal to start a level in the same way as you would within the level. There are 13 sections each with a random number of levels between 3-5. As you complete a section you're rewarded with a wordless comic strip panel depicting the story of a boy and his robot. It seems rather pointless but why not, I guess. There is one glaring issue with this game: each time you complete a level it is LOCKED and you can't go back to replay it. Bizarre. The dev says he had no idea that people would want to replay levels. Erm, OK...
The game is currently Windows only, but there is Linux in the offing once the dev has worked out some bugs with it. Steam Cloud, trading cards and achievements included.
Sound & Vision
Although there are comparatively few graphical elements, it's tasteful and stylish. There's a blue/orange theme throughout which helps your brain connect with the puzzle system. The whole thing shimmers like a desert heatwave - no, my video isn't fuzzy, that's how it actually looks.
Music is more of a background ambiance with no melody and the sound effects are the usual thing, it's all pretty standard stuff for this type of game.
Difficulty
There are a few downright easy levels, even in the later stages, but generally I'd say medium difficulty. Levels will keep you thinking for a few minutes but not much longer than that. It's a casual, relaxing game with no danger of rage-quit.
Value
It's a good quality game and you won't be disappointed, but with 50-60 levels, many of which don't take long to solve, this is a rather short game for the price. The final achievement is called 35:00 which means you can speedrun the entire game in 35 minutes, and this is the only replay value you'll get out of it. I would wait for a 50% sale.
Verdict
It's a pleasant, satisfying game with an interesting and unusual concept. It's fun while it lasts, but this is not one you'll be adding to your favourites. You'll play it once, enjoy it, then move on and forget about it.
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It takes something unique in a puzzle game for it to attract my attention. Usually I overlook them when they present themselves like so many others as something that uses the same tired mechanics of other games and puzzles and adds the 'twist' of being extra difficult or painted purple. When I saw the simple but fairly unique design of Semispheres, I had to try it out.
I don't know if I've ever had a moment of 'reading a book by its cover' being met with such accuracy, but Semipheres delivered exactly what it presented in its trailer and screenshots. The control scheme was intuitive at first, but the puzzles soon had my brain splitting in half and struggling to get my hands to respond the way I wanted them to. What makes this game so different is that you so often see the solution to the puzzle well before you can really execute it properly. Even with my limited experience in puzzle games, I recognized this feeling from the Portal series, where often you'd discover what actions you need to take but had to contend with precise execution before you were successful. The most difficult and ultimately most memorable puzzles in Semispheres were those that had you relying on precision timing and accurate movement of your orbs simultaneously. Succeeding here was very rewarding.
Semispheres really delivers some quality design in mechanics and puzzles along with relaxing visuals and music. The bit of story tied in doesn't hurt as well. Only a couple issues really stood out. The main one is that when I did finish it, it reset without any sort of confirmation. Sometimes a player wants to go back and do specific puzzles or maybe even check out the story portions again. It seems like it would be easy to change that from an automatic event to one that has to be triggered in the menu. The other thing that some might find frustrating is the length. It only took me a little over two hours to complete it and I'm not exactly the best puzzle solver on the planet. Yet even then that could draw comparisons between this and the original Portal given it averaged a three hour play time. I personally found two hours to be quite good given the ramp up in difficulty that is present.
You probably won't see too many puzzle game recommendations from me, but Semispheres is definitely one of them. Especially for fans of the puzzle genre. They may not find a $10 investment too great for two hours of gameplay (or less if you're really good), but for novices like myself, the $5 discounted price I paid was well worth it. I can only hope that the developers have found enough success to move forward with the title or at least the mechanics and give us a sequel or similar game in the future.
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It's pretty good, worth the priceDeserves more love from fans of abstract puzzley/stealth stuff.
**I don't think it would be any fun without a proper controller (with 2 joysticks).
Each level is split vertically into 2 halves, as you can see from the store screenshots. You control 2 spheres (jellyfish?) simultaneously, and need to get each to the exit on their side of the board. For most levels, you can usually split up the task to work on one side at a time, alternating back and forth, but there are definitely levels that require active, simultaneous control of both spheres. Thus, I wouldn't fully agree with JimDeadlock's Review that it's "a puzzler through and through," since quite a few levels really do require "timing and dexterity."
The puzzley elements generally rely on how you use a sphere on one side of the board (e.g., left) to grab and use pickups that can influence the other side (e.g., right) and manipulate pitfalls. The main pitfalls are little sentinels whose line-of-sight-cones you need to avoid. If one of your spheres does get spotted by a sentinel, the sphere goes back to where it started -- which is actually used as part of the solution in a few levels.
So, for example, one of the pickups lets you send out a sort of sound-wave that distracts sentinels. If your left-sphere has this pickup and is standing in a "window" to the right side of the board, your left-sphere can clear a path on the right side to help your right-sphere through. Another pickup lets you open up "windows" in the first place. And so on. You can see how levels get complicated as you need to plan out the order in which to pick up and deploy pickups, on both sides of the board. (Each sphere can only carry 1 pickup at a time, and they're all single-use, but then re-spawn on the board where you found them).
There are 54ish levels, and while many of them offer a slow learning curve to learn new mechanics, the tougher ones can get pretty mind-bending as you work them out on the first playthrough. I think my first playthrough was ~2.5h total. Once you crack each level, they aren't too bad in retrospect, and so the 1 achievement you won't get in a normal playthrough (a speedrun achievement for beating the game in <35minutes in 1 sitting), is quite possible, though it took me a few tries -- especially since once you beat the last level, the game resets. No opportunity to practice the tough ones individually :(
There's supposed to be a story. I couldn't find it, but the user screenshots show that it does exist, so Idunno what happened in my case -- I doubt I missed much. The Settings/Options are a bit more filled out than in many games at the same price-point, and at time of writing, the Dev is active in the forums -- more than I can say for a lot of games, sadly.

barely just opened, still, hadn't seen big news as per gameplay.
saw a beautiful artstyle, tho, gorgeously chilling colors and somewhat classy ambient.
also felt my two different brain hemispheres working.
super recommended, one of those you'll come back to, like a little comfy chilling corner.
awesome gift from Killer Joe/Blue

I enjoyed playing Semipheres.
It features 50+ levels of mainly logical puzzles that are centered around controlling two balls on separate fields with the same architecture and making use of the items that are available on each field so that each ball can reach its exit. There are five basic game mechanics that you can use to manipulate the surroundings.
The combination of these mechanics generally provides for interesting problems but even though I had fun playing the levels, there is one major downside: in my opinion the learning curve is just to flat which sort of makes the levels too easy to solve. I finished the game with all achievements in less than three hours which means that average solving time for each puzzle was around three minutes. So I can't help but think that there could have been a much bigger amount of more challenging puzzles.
Don't get me wrong, in each puzzle you have to find out first what to do. But in most puzzles it's just not that diffcult to figure out and then to implement. I recall only three puzzles that really challenged me because of the amount and positioning of available items. In most puzzles the options you have quite clearly indicate what you have to do.
So while I recommend this game as a nice simplistic puzzler I also have to mention that I think it is not worth more than 5€/$.

Finished this in no time at all.
Game was a good idea.
You may find it more difficult if you struggle to do two things at once.
If not, decide if 2 hours of gameplay is enough for you based on the price.