KAMI: As We Play

As we play offers the thought strands of the reviewer as they’re going through the game. This offers unique content for the reader so they can come to understand the conflicting feelings of the reviewer as they’re playing a game for the very first time. All feedback on this concept is welcome.

Origami

Back in the mid 1990s, there was a cool thing you could do with the paint package on the computers in our school. If you created a bunch of abstract shapes across the screen, selected the ‘fill’ tool then repeatedly clicked the left and right mouse buttons, the screen would be filled with a series of barn door wipes that gradually removed shape after shape until the entire screen was a single colour. This may not sound particularly entertaining but you have to remember desktop computers were still a novelty back then, and the slow wipe effect generated by the computer’s total inability to run an extremely simple paint package with any kind of efficiency, made the whole thing visually compelling. Still, in retrospect, I should have wasted less time messing around in MS Paint and spent more time playing Encarta 95’s Mindmaze. I miss Mindmaze.

KAMI feels a bit like what would happen if you took that messing around in Paint and turned it into a puzzle game. Each stage consists of a 10×16 grid with a colour palette underneath it, and it is the player’s job to paint the entire board a single colour within a limited number of moves. The player does this by methodically selecting one of the colours from the palette, then selecting a single square from the grid, at which point that square and every same-coloured square connected to it, will be converted to that colour. The player continues along these lines, selecting which colour to apply and where to apply it, until all of the board is the same colour. If the player manages to complete the board within a specific limited number of turns, they get a perfect, but stages are also passable if the player goes one move over this number. Any higher, however, and the player must complete the level from the beginning. Stages are grouped into blocks of 9, with all of the stages in each group needing to be completed before the next nine can be accessed. The puzzles are challenging and creative, and seem to have a logical progression of ideas and tactics. As such, I often found myself struggling for a solution to something that just a moment ago seemed like it was going to require a similar solution to the previous stage.

The whole thing is draped in a rather muted but relaxing visual style with an origami theme. ‘Kami’ itself means paper, and so each grid is made up of paper, with the various colours folding out over each other with a satisfying series of ‘swishes’ as the board changes from one colour to another. And to give the whole thing that final touch of Japanese Origami theming, the game’s menus are accompanied by traditional-sounding Japanese string music.

I Fold

Unfortunately, being one of those Mobile-to-PC conversions that turn up on our screens from time to time, the game has a tendency to become quite dull rather too quickly. While the game is well-suited to quick, short bursts of puzzling while on a contractually mandated break, or at a bus stop, it loses a lot of its charm when played in longer chunks. The game further compounds this by massively inhibiting usage of the game’s inbuilt hint system, limiting players to a mere three first-move (or two first-move and two second-move) hints per day. This is a player-unfriendly system that not only tries to shoehorn users into playing the game at a pace that they aren’t neccessarily happy with, but is also rendered redundant by the fact that Steam is capable of displaying a walkthough of the game in its overlay. Apparently, this is a remnant of the mobile version’s rather eyebrow-raising pay-for-hints system, but thankfully the mere suggestion of this exploitative concept seems to have been excised from this version entirely.

The game’s presentation is also underwhelmingly minimalistic. Like State of Play’s previous game ‘Lume’, KAMI’s gimmick is in its papercraft construction, but unlike Lume, which was full of fascinatingly creative detail, KAMI’s entire claim to be ‘made of real paper’ seems to be that the creators scanned in a sheet of paper to use the texture. Sure, there’s a folding effect that appears every time a square changes from one colour to another, but while the game looks like paper, it really doesn’t move like it. It’s just too swift, too smooth and too perfect to look genuinely papery. The sound is also extremely limited, apparently ultilising only one audio track and a couple of different sound files throughout.

Having said that, it’s probably unfair to expect much more from an ultra budget, made-for-mobile title, and State of Play should be commended, at the very least, for creating a solid and well designed offering, and for selling the game at a price point at least vaguely within the ball park of the iOS release. There are far too many little mobile and tablet puzzle games that, when sold on PC, inflate their value to as much as ten or fifteeen times that of the original version.

Areas for Development

Overhaul or remove restrictions on the hint system
Improve presentation
Add more content

Final Analysis

Technical Competency – 9/10

Graphical State/Sound Quality – 6/10

Network Stability – N/A

Overall – 7.5

Kami is a solidly designed, if a little sterile, puzzle game that offers a good amount of challenge for a fair price. It still has the all too familiar scars of a mobile-to-PC port, however, and it’s definitely not the kind of game that you’ll want to play for more than a handful of minutes at a time. Considering State of Play’s previous game, the extensively polished but ultimately empty presentation is a serious disappointment, however, and it’s a shame that more care and attention wasn’t put into using the game’s origami theme in more creative or at least visually interesting ways.

(These grades assess our playthrough, taking into consideration how many (if any) bugs were encountered, whether there were any interuptions in gameplay and the product’s final technical state. These scores, coupled with the Final Analysis and Areas for Development, are suggestions for future patches and updates which the developers could (and in our opinion, should) explore. These scores are separate to our DLC/Expansion Reviews but link into our Patch/Firmware Reviews.)

(These scores are not designed as a grading system to determine the entertainment value of a product and should not be treated as such..)