Kusari is Deviously Addictive

by Eric March on June 29, 2008 at 2:31 am

Taking a break from following the whole Rogers Wireless fiasco, I grabbed a new game off Installer. Its name is Kusari, it’s by Chris Nordberg, and I can’t seem to stop playing it.

The object of Kusari is quite simple. You are presented with a 5×7 board populated with round counters. Each counter has an arrow on it. Your task is to move your token to each arrow. As you do, your token will follow the path of arrows until it reaches a counter pointing to an empty space. Then you pick your next counter in your immediate vicinity to move to and continue on until you have reached that level’s goal — or get trapped without doing so. You can move in any of the 8 cardinal directions, with valid moves indicated with green-coloured tiles, but you cannot move to an empty space, so you have to follow the arrows and pick your paths carefully, lest the arrows lead you to a dead end you can’t move from. Once you’ve reached your target and have either cleared the board or can’t move any further, you move on to the next level.

There are 20 levels in all, and each level has a target and a time limit. The time limit starts at 100 seconds and subtracts 5 seconds on each subsequent level until it reaches 35 seconds, when it will reduce no further. Each level also requires you to clear a set number of counters, starting at 16 and increasing by one each level. You must clear the target number of counters in the alloted time or you forfiet a life and start the level over. You have three lives in total, so make them count. Scoring starts at 1 point for a tile, but each counter’s value is squared for each sequential token in a chain that you move to. The longer a chain of tokens you can clear with one move, the higher your score will be. A bonus of 200 points is given if you can clear the board, and you also get a 2,000 point bonus if you manage to pass all 20 levels.

The gameplay here couldn’t be simpler. Simply tap on a counter to move your token and it will follow the arrows until it comes to a stop, lather, rinse and repeat until you’ve completed the level by whatever method that takes. There are some nice afterthoughts that really make the gameplay though: When your token only has one possible move that it can make, the game will automatically advance your token to that counter until you’ve got more than one possible move to make; when the time limits get shorter, the gameplay gets faster, and the token movement increases in speed too, to help you clear the board faster.

Graphically, Kusari is polished to a shine. The game pieces are detailed and gorgeous, and each level is given its own distinct background, which adds some incentive to keep playing, just to see what the next level is going to look like. There is also a high score table to keep track of your progress — however, it is not net-enabled, so the scores are all local, and there seems to be an issue with the #1 scoring position simplaying both your score and the level you achieved; the level gets ellipsed (”…”) because there’s not enough space to display it all.

That’s about the only complaint I can make for the game though, because otherwise it is a deviously addictive casual action puzzler that will keep you coming back for one more game. Give it a shot and tell me I’m wrong. You can find it on the Ste Packaging repo (http://blog.psmxy.org). Check out the screenies below.

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