Koi (PC)

What makes a game relaxing? Calm music, soft visuals, and low pressure activities are some common traits of relaxing games, and Koi definitely checks these boxes with its design approach. However, there is also a common trap some of these video games fall into where they round off all the edges in the quest to make a calm experience and end up making play dull rather than relaxing. Koi does manage to avoid completely falling into that pitfall, but unfortunately, it’s still pretty clear it struggles with making its tranquil adventure engaging.

 

While named for the type of carp most commonly known for their multicolored bodies and role as decorative fish in special ponds, this game’s koi is out in the wild after having been released from captivity. At first, the koi explores the waters, helping other single-colored fish reach lotus flowers to help them bloom, but soon the effects of mankind’s pollution crop up, the carp now searching for a way to reverse the corruption. Immediately, it’s a game that has some fairly obvious similarities to a different relaxing game known as Flower, that game instead being about a flower petal flying through natural environments before it too finds humanity encroaching with its polluting influence and that petal then aiming to bring things back to their natural state. Flower is not a poor choice for inspiration though, and again, much like Flower, it does a pretty good job with evoking the emotion its going for.

Koi’s visuals begin very bright and simple. The water is one large blue expanse that doesn’t even get the slightest bit disturbed when white ripples expand out from points of action. The fish are simple shapes made of one color besides their black eyes, flowers being almost more light than shape when they bloom, and the sounds backing things up subdued with lovely piano music backing the adventure. When you start to uncover the corruption though, things get a little harsher, never really reaching a point of discordance but there still being darker grey imagery and music meant to make you feel slightly on edge. Unfortunately, these aesthetics do come with their downsides. Across the game’s eight levels, a few of them are large open areas, the player urged to go from bottom to top or left to right to complete the stage but the level itself essentially one giant square of water. Some do break up this square by having pipes, plants, or other area-appropriate obstructions to make you swim around a path rather than a large stretch of water, but these adjustments to level design don’t really do much more than funnel you towards your objectives. Each level involves you trying to locate the fish needed to activate flowers and the way onward, but the fish and the optional collectibles can sometimes be rather spread out, the player meant to swim all around the area to find them. With the water so plain looking and very little breaking it up much of its surface area, some of these levels can come down to slowly going back and forth across its expanse hoping for something important to eventually crop up.

 

There really isn’t much to what your Koi can do either. You mostly just move it around, the controls sometimes a little off despite this being the only real action your fish is capable of. The down and up arrow on the keyboard will both send it upward and offer no options for downward movement, so WASD is basically a necessity if you want to actually control your fish properly. A controller is another possible movement option, but the only other action you really take during regular play is pressing a button to confirm your fish deliveries. Finding the fish in more linear stages is rarely a worry, the action often taking you by them and only requiring a bit of small searching or moving properly to grab them. In the more polluted areas you will have to worry about things like currents, but the real worries are black fish and electricity. If you or the fish following you are rushed by a black fish or end up in an electrified area of the water, any effected fish will be momentarily slowed down immensely, unable to be hurt until they’ve recovered their energy but their movement so slow it still serves as a punishment for not being fast enough to slip away from trouble. They’re not placed in a way to make them particularly difficult to avoid though, so the relaxing mood isn’t spoiled by their presence and they do make for a better challenge than trying to find the small fish in big ponds.

Every now and then though, Koi does an odd puzzle segment to break up areas. These consist of things like a branch that will light up leaves in a sequence you need to repeat or a group of lizards that will need to have their patterns matched in a game of Memory, these again being small obstructions rather than anything that really pushes the player too hard. They’re also a bit too simple to really get involved in though, the branch game feeling particularly slow in the level it appears in multiple times. Outside of swimming about in search of the vital fish that must be moved elsewhere, this is the only major gameplay style, and it’s one that feels added in with little thought, the already short game featuring very few of these breaks from the norm save for some strange sudden bursts of them.

 

Perhaps where most of the small issues are compounded comes in the the puzzle pieces and stars hidden around stages. To get a decent rating on a stage you’ll need to collect both, but the story of your koi fish is actually told by the puzzle pieces you collect, so while you can play through and get the basics of it wanting to get rid of the pollution, its personal history requires investing in the long searches. The last playable level in particular is pretty bad about scattering its collectibles around just enough to require long uneventful swims, and while it will stick things in the corners or near areas of importance to be noticed, sometimes these stars and pieces are just out in their own little spot that you’ll have to find by aimlessly swimming. Even worse, some of these can be hidden from view, meaning you’ll have to go under or through environmental objects and just hope the reason your fish sparkled was it found one of the items, especially since you can’t check your collectables until finishing a stage. Extras in a game meant to be meditative and chill are a good way of adding an element for more challenge-focused players to pursue since the main activities are often easy, but here this is just something to make play longer, something the game also attempts with a Steam achievement for playing actively for 24 hours when the game hardly last two to three hours even when going for every collectible.

THE VERDICT: On the surface, Koi is built pretty well for a zen game. Its music is lovely and its world soft and pleasing, but when it comes time to play one of the game’s eight levels, its aversion to making things challenging instead leads to a rather boring title. Levels are often too large and mostly empty but will still have collectables scattered about that are tied to understanding the game’s story, and even when following the path of mandatory action, your tasks are mostly just about moving around or doing busy work in the form of matching puzzles. Even with level hazards and different environments to inject some energy into this adventure at the water’s surface, Koi loses its charm a little too quickly to work as the relaxing diversion its aiming to be.

 

And so, I give Koi for PC…

A BAD rating. Artistically, Koi is a success. It’s a beautiful little title, but much like the koi ponds that inspired it, part of the beauty should come from seeing it all in motion, and it is in that regard that Koi comes up short. Playing a level for a few minutes seems simple and relaxing, but as you continue, empty stretches of water and slow games of Simon Says with a branch make it hard not to focus on the fact that its a threadbare experience.

 

There’s an odd ethos in gaming that to be serene means stripping things down to the point they’re too basic to really engage with, but there are plenty of games that can be relaxing without stripping away challenge or direction. Puzzle games like Picross and structured solitaire are objective focused and provide mentally stimulating play without pressuring the player, the Kirby and Yoshi series can provide easy action that still has substance and the opportunity for greater challenge, and Flower, the game closest in structure and concept to Koi, even manages to mix things up and cut a quicker pace than Koi. If levels had been condensed to the essentials or more sights were scattered about to make exploration less dull, then Koi might have kept the player around for more than just some light piano music and bright colors.