A Kappa’s Trail

Genre: Top-Down Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

A Kappa’s Trail is a family-friendly Top-Down Arcade game released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2010, and later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released. In this game, players guide a kappa through an obstacle course using the touchscreen.

Just what is a kappa? Evidently it is a sort of Japanese water spirit, a humanoid turtle demon spirit creature… thing. Yeah, I’m no expert on Japanese mythology, but in any case this is clearly a cuter, more cartoony version of that mythical being. This game’s odd, Japanese-flavored presentation is one of its charms.

This game’s presentation uses simple pixel art 2D visuals and a droning, repetitive soundtrack. It’s tolerable, but nothing special.

As for the gameplay, players must guide the kappa through mazelike environments, looking for subtle hiding places for smaller kappas that will help him on his journey. Players must be precise in where they draw the kappa’s path, avoiding pitfalls and enemies, and they can’t dawdle too long – a disembodied hand is following along his trail and will snatch him up if he takes too long.

I found myself frustrated with the gameplay. When it works as intended, it’s fairly straightforward, slow-paced, and somewhat boring. However, too often it does not work as intended. It is far too easy to fall off a cliff when you thought you were merely close to the edge. And what’s worse, the game respawns you right next to the edge again, and half the time when this happened and I tried to draw a line away from the edge, the next thing my kappa did was fall right back in.

In addition, the D-Pad, circle pad, and buttons are all useless – the game turns them all into a pause button. This is extra frustrating because it would have been nice to use the D-pad to scroll the camera. Instead, players must laboriously drag the screen around using the stylus, which is both tedious and makes for potential for players to tap the wrong place to interfere with the gameplay.

There are minigames I could talk about here as well, but the short version is that I just did not like the core gameplay in A Kappa’s Trail. It’s tedious, frustrating, and doesn’t do enough interesting things to justify the infuriating design issues that crop up through the game. Unless you’re enticed by this game’s cutesy presentation and odd topic matter, you’re better off skipping it.

tl;dr – A Kappa’s Trail is an Arcade-style game where you guide an odd, cartoony Japanese water spirit using the touchscreen. Unfortunately, the game design suffers from a number of frustrating issues, resulting in a game that’s only worth playing if you’re somehow enticed by that odd topic matter and presentation.

Grade: C-

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