Koi Review

While there’s no shortage of games that offer solid gameplay at a low price with appropriately low production values, few dare venture out to the adventure/exploration subgenre of this category. Perhaps the most notable entries in this corner of the video game landscape come from thatgamecompany, with Flow, Flower, and Journey. That’s certainly not a bad source of inspiration to draw from, and developers Dotoyou certainly attempted to do so with their game Koi. Unfortunately, this 2D adventure fails to captivate on any level.

Koi lets players assume control of a lone fish in a koi pond. It has seemingly been separated from its owner, and must travel across a few different environments in order to find home as well as restore life to the waters damaged by human pollution. The narrative is as thin as they come, with barely any text or story beats. The themes here are very similar to Flower, but executed with much less skill and finesse. Players will need to collect puzzle pieces spread across the game, which will complete a series of drawings and provide accompanying text that actually reveals what has taken place. Even though the game lasts barely an hour, Koi isn’t able to come up with a worthwhile short story.

The gameplay, meanwhile, is reminiscent of other simplistic 2D exploration games, such as Flow or Hero of Many. Players control a single fish and navigate through a few levels. Movement with the DS4 stick is straightforward, but using the circle as the interaction button feels awkward. Most of the levels are decently sized and open, and your goal is to collect smaller fish that will follow you. Each of the smaller fish has a color, and you must take them to a lily pad flower of the same color. Doing so will allow the flower to bloom, and eventually reveal an exit from the level. There’s little challenge or thought here, as you simply go from one place to another.

The game attempts to introduce dangers in two forms – large black fish that will attack you if you enter their immediate field of view, and electric shock zones. The enemy fish are easily avoided and their wind-up charges can also be dodged, and the shocks are often easily avoided or bypassed. Even if you do get hit, you’re simply immobilized for a short period, and that’s about all the punishment the game can muster. There is a missed opportunity to add a tiny bit of depth to the gameplay by letting players hide from the black fish under lily pads. The environment also attempts to slow down your progress by using exactly three puzzles through the whole game. One is a Simon-says, one is a matching puzzle, and one asks you to rotate parts of an image until it lines up. They are simple and basic, and kind of pointless.

Despite having just a few levels, Koi is unable to provide a consistent experience. Two late levels are so vast, and yet completely empty, that players will need to use the game’s help system to point to the objective location, lest they want to keep swimming in nothingness for tens of seconds. Another couple of levels have the concept of fast moving water, thus limiting your movement options or propelling you forward. But the initial introduction of this mechanic offers no visual or audio cues, thus causing confusion as to why you’re suddenly speeding down the stream.

Players may think for a moment that it was a bug, as the game has a few of them. The smaller fish that follow you have a tendency to get stuck or potentially swept away by the current – so it is good that to bloom the flowers you only need to make the fish follow you in the first place, and they don’t need to be there for the prompt to actually appear. In another instance, the follower fishes got stuck in vicious cycle of being zapped and immobilized by an electric cable. Each time you approach and have them follow your main koi fish, they do a little spin move – but this move kept putting them into the range of electric shock. It took minutes to wiggle them free, as the shock occurs very frequently and the animation wasn’t quick enough to get them to follow you after the spin move.

Being a very short game, Koi offers few reasons to replay it again. There are puzzle pieces mentioned earlier, which unlock bits of a storyboard. There are also generic stars to collect. Both of these items are simply hidden across the game’s levels in far corners or behind some scenery. Collecting these, as well as performing a few specific gameplay feats, unlocks new color skins for your koi fish. Players can also look for a toad in each level for some random piece of advice, or hidden fish that will let you bloom all bonus flowers in the game. Even with most collectibles, the game runs out of things to do in under 90 minutes. Despite being so brief to begin with, the developers still had the audacity to lock another level until you’ve found all stars in the game.

Sometimes, titles that lack a great gameplay experience can be somewhat saved by their impressive presentation. Koi is not one of those titles. While it looks decent enough by PS4 indie standards, there’s nothing particularly impressive about its artistic style or technical visuals. Menus offer simple icons that are not immediately intuitive. The music offers a relaxing mix of piano arrangements, however most songs repeat the same musical arrangement and it becomes quite repetitive.

Koi is a misfire. It attempts to follow in the footsteps of simple, “relaxing” games but misses the mark in every category. It’s not long enough, nor does it offer enticing gameplay mechanics. The visual and audio presentation is not impressive enough to get the game a pass as a tech demo. For the asking price, Koi comes up short and as a port of last year's mobile game, fails to offer anything new for PS4 owners.