What Lively Chair Simulator is
Lively Chair Simulator puts you in control of a chair, leg by leg. There is no WASD movement here. Each of the four legs has its own forward and backward input, so walking starts out awkward and stays that way for a while. The control scheme is QWERASDFGH: four keys move the legs forward, four move them back, and two are abilities. Once the pattern clicks, the chair can do more than walk — it can run, go up slopes and stairs, push boxes, and jump.
There are 7 different chairs to pick from, and they are not all equal. Some chairs handle the level set better than others, so choosing one matters. The single-player side has 12 levels built to drill the controls: by the end of them you should be able to walk, run, climb, push boxes, and jump without thinking about which key does what. Achievements are in the game as well.
Playing it with friends
Multiplayer has six games, and two of them — 15m Race and Seesaw — can be started with a single player, so you can warm up alone before the group shows up. 15m Race is a straight run. Just Run Pushing Game is about staying inside the play area: the last chair not touching the outside wins.
StoneBall is a team game scored to 10000 points. You earn points when your team's pointing stoneball has either the public stoneball or your team's stoneballs in range, and you lose points when no teammate is in range of your pointing stoneball, or when an opposing team's stoneball is in range of it. 6036 accumulates the time of whoever last touched the ball; the round ends when someone's total hits 60 seconds, and the chair whose time lands closest to 36 seconds wins. Air Hockey plays like air hockey. Seesaw ends the moment the seesaw touches the ground — you score by pushing stone balls away, and you lose points if you fall off.
Before you start
Expect a learning curve. The leg-by-leg controls are the whole game, and the single-player levels exist because you will need them. Read the QWERASDFGH layout properly before jumping into multiplayer, since the two ability keys sit apart from the movement keys and are easy to mix up under pressure. Simple 3D graphics keep the focus on the physics and the movement, so the fun comes from wrestling with the chair rather than from visuals.