Kaamos Is A Compellingly Dark Take On A Familiar Puzzle Genre
A sinister sin on match-3 puzzles.
There are some game worlds so magical players would want to move there full-time, and others grim enough to make even living through the present day seem desirable by comparison. Think Dark Souls’ Lordran — it’s a nice place to visit (digitally), but you wouldn’t want to live there. Not that you’d survive long anyway. Surprisingly, the latest game to nail the tone of its bleak world so well that it’s equally fascinating and terrifying isn’t a hard-as-nails action game, but a puzzle-based roguelike.
Kaamos first caught my eye when I played a demo during a recent Steam Next Fest. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world where you trudge forth from one battle to another, gaining new loot after every victory and at calmer rest spots along the way. In battle, you rely not on quick reflexes, but on skill in a tile-matching puzzle that at first resembles a match-3 game like Puzzle Quest, but works much differently in practice.
You are trying to match three symbols of the same color in Kaamos, but the way you achieve that is novel. Rather than swapping the places of two symbols, you rotate an entire row or column at a time. Like in the recent Arranger, any tiles that slide off the side of the puzzle board will pop back up on the opposite side. If you’re a match-3 sicko like me, you may have an easier time grabbing the mechanic immediately, but it’s a much different way of solving puzzles in practice. There are a huge number of possibilities for how you align your tiles in each turn, and finding the exact position where you can make multiple matches at once is extremely satisfying.
When you start Kaamos, your board will be mostly gray tiles, which can’t be used to make a match. The red, yellow, blue, and green tiles you use to attack, dodge, or gain armor and block stats are added by what equipment you’re holding, so as you gather better loot, your board will slowly fill with useful tiles. Some also increase the maximum amount of armor or power you can gain, add bonus damage, or let you attack twice per turn. Managing your equipment to make sure they’re giving you a helpful mix of tiles and stats is just as crucial as making the right matches in combat. In fact, it’s arguably more important to pick your gear right than to hone your skills, since heading into a fight with the wrong setup can completely tank your chances of winning.
Setting up your gear is simple compared to traditional deckbuilders, but every decision counts.
Because so much depends on your equipment, it’s possible to essentially lose a fight before you even start it by preparing poorly. Kaamos does run into some trouble here, since just not finding the right gear can mean you don’t have the ability to dish out or block enough damage to win, no matter how well you play. In a few instances, I came to a near deadlock when neither my character nor the enemy I was fighting was strong enough to break the other’s guard. Kaamos is a slow-paced game at the best of times, but it can nearly grind to a halt if you don’t have great equipment. The outcomes sometimes feel more like the result of luck than planning.
Developer Pepperbox Studios boasts that Kaamos has more than 180 items to choose from, but that presents less variety than you might expect. Kaamos has a small pool of stats to choose from in the first place, so most items only offer minor tweaks. The same goes for its characters. There are seven to choose from, and while I still have two to unlock, the ones I have offer little in the way of variety, mostly just granting bonus damage to your attacks for using different kinds of defensive skills.
Kaamos isn’t as versatile or replayable as other roguelike games like Slay the Spire or Witching Stone, but even if it’s more limited, it nails the feeling of clutching to survival in a lightless world. Where tracing spells in Witching Stone makes you feel like a mage and building a deck in Slay the Spire makes you feel like an adventurer pulling from a bag of tricks, Kaamos convincingly portrays a bare-bones journey aided with little more than a sword and shield. Even the sensation of slamming a row of tiles together has a pleasingly physical quality that evokes throwing up your shield and quickly swinging your mace back at your opponent. It’s a harsh world in Kaamos, and struggling through it is just as satisfying as it is difficult.
