Kami

Developer: State of Play Games
Steam Release: Jan 2014
Hours Played: 3.0
Similar To: UniOne
Rating: 5/5 Parsnips

GAMEPLAY

With plenty of duds washing up on the coast of the sea of minimalist puzzlers, choosing the right ones to while away the hours can be a bit of a minefield. Fortunately, with its delicately handcrafted aesthetic and tasteful Japanese art-style, KAMI is one that you won't regret picking up. Facing a screen of interconnected pieces of paper made up of different colours and divided further by many small squares, your job is to fill the screen entirely with one colour. To do this, you simply click on a square of your chosen hue and watch as that area gets filled in. You repeat this process until you reach your goal using the minimum amount of moves. Reach the target moves and you're rewarded a perfect sticker, one over earns an OK while using two over par gets you a big fat fail. 

BALANCE & PACE

The game is divided into batches of nine puzzles per eight "pages" (including three pages of the more difficult premium puzzles). However, I did feel that the ramp up in difficulty came all too soon... a fault with many promising games with great ideas. Sure, give the casual player simple puzzles to learn the mechanics to get into their stride but please don't rob them of such a pleasant experience by ramping up the difficulty so soon that they get put off. With KAMI I feel the game would have been enhanced had their been a larger number of elementary puzzles earlier so that the player had more of a sense of achievement.
 

PRESENTATION & DESIGN 

Outside the puzzles, the design is very plain with a large white background dominating the home page. Purists may frown at the icons obviously associated with mobile gaming but the whole package demonstrates a classy and refined sensibility on the part of the developers. With a gentle rustle and faint crackle, each move is accompanied by a pleasant animation as the paper unwraps. In addition, as the paper unfolds it satisfyingly merges with neighbouring areas giving the whole experience an almost calming therapeutic effect. All the colours as well as the colour-schemes are tastefully done and a gentle ditty played with traditional Japanese instruments is heard while at the menus which goes silent when entering a puzzle. In windowed mode the game can be changed to any size at the drag of the mouse.
   

PROGRESS SYSTEM

With its simple and minimalist ideas comes a very easy-to-understand progress system. Clicking Classic Puzzles on the home page takes you to nine thumbnails of the first nine puzzles. As you work your way through each puzzle, you are awarded a sticker on completion which could either be gold for perfect (reaching the target number of moves), blue for OK (if you went one over), and black for a fail (if you went over by two or more). The gold and blue stickers are then displayed under each thumbnail to show how well you did. For a fail, you just get the usual grey question mark symbol to show the puzzle has not been completed to the desired standard. As mentioned, there are 8 pages of 9 puzzles altogether. 

CONCLUSION

Minimalist puzzle games can be very hit or miss. Some are stylishly done but offer dull gameplay (Hocus and Knights); some are quite dull aesthetically and quite short but are pretty good for gameplay (Hook and Zup!); while others are just dull all round (Ichi and Unium). KAMI can join other illustrious greats such as Line and Lyne for being a smart and clean good looker. Its gameplay is also certainly absorbing enough to lift it even higher but my only reservation is that, due to its steep difficulty curve, it might not be a stayer. Nevertheless, it still offers rich enough contemplation - and plenty of hours of gameplay - for those with the patience to appreciate its depth.