8 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 5.1 hrs on record (4.3 hrs at review time)
Posted: Aug 23, 2018 @ 5:49am

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KAMI is a casual game with a simple concept but complex puzzles. Its serene exterior, neat animations, and calming music do little to dampen the internal turmoil as you progress through the puzzles.

Fall into the simple and mindless state of changing colors as you pick up some perfect scores to start. Pretty soon, those perfect scores deteriorate into okay scores, then again decaying into failures. This progression is intended as the difficulty ramps up in later levels. The casual, friendly, and colorful appearance only turn into the casual mockery the game made of me.

Each puzzle is simple, you start with an arrange of colors, and you can choose to turn any contiguous section of one color into any of the others on the screen. The fewer turns it takes for you to achieve complete uniformity of color, the better. Each puzzle has an accompanying number of turns it should take. Use only those turns, and you shall receive a Perfect mark. If you need one more turn, it's only OK. Lastly, if you require any additional turns, then the game calls your life and being into question. Is failure acceptable?

The puzzles are separated into groups of nine. So if you get stuck on one particular puzzle, you can always do the other ones in the group before going back to that one in particular. Often the puzzles build on each other, and progressively increases in difficulty. However, just because you can solve later puzzles does not mean that you can easily perfect the previous ones.

In the classic game, there are five groups of puzzles available. There are also challenge puzzles, labeled as "Premium," with three different sections available. All of these are available to you from the very start. These happen to be called Premium puzzles for a reason. They have seemingly improbable solutions, but they are there. The second set of challenge puzzles also makes use of patterns in service colors, just to dazzle you a little and to put you off balance.

All in all, I am happy I tried this game. It's aesthetically pleasing, with plenty of calming music. I am going to go back and try to solve every puzzle to a Perfect score, though I am not sure if I will be able to. Nevertheless, I think this is a great puzzle game for everyone.
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