Score attack games and online leaderboards. Name a better match. Even when the game itself is a bit odd, stilted or off the wall the glue of score attack and online leaderboards can help alleviate strange game design. Doashime is one such case. It is a hard-as-nails colour-matching puzzle game that asks you to match cute animals on a train before you run out of stamina. Sounds cute? It has teeth – and that’s not really for the better either…
Doashime gives you three train doors to three train carriages and your goal is to score as many points as possible by filling up the train with animals. Two green animals sat next to each other create a yellow animal. Two yellows generate a red. Two red animals make a blue… but you never get given a blue animal to merge them back to green again. Instead, you’ve got to juggle the previous chain to get two blues created – merge them back to green and keep on going! There is a timer running down to zero which refills slightly for every colour match you make. When it hits zero, the train pulls away and it’s game over.
The time limit you are working with is just a few seconds so you need to be quick and precise. Each carriage only seats a few animals so one wrong move will utterly ruin your run. If you fill up a carriage, its doors close and being honest, you might as well give up there and then. You can’t survive on just two doors and that’s because of the conductor. Throughout the game, a roaming conductor moves between the three doors blocking the one he stands in front of. This means you often end up breaking chains and making bad moves on the other doors because you have no choice. The timer is dropping fast so you have to do something, but doing something is often run ending too. Where the conductor moves next is random and so some runs work with you, others are just mean. There is a slight delay as your animal runs for the train door too, which means if you mistime a move, the conductor will jump into the animals’ way, bash them off the screen and you take a stamina (timer) hit. Ouch.
All these mechanics conspire to make Doashime an incredibly hard game. Runs lasting longer than two minutes feel like a miracle. There is also only one level layout, so when you are forced to play short, frustrating runs where the game feels out to get you – Doashime gets annoying fast. Thankfully, the game comes with weekly, monthly and all-time online leaderboards and this is the saving grace of the experience. I could still only enjoy Doashime for short bursts, but at least I could attempt to climb the rankings in my pitiful attempts of high-score chasing. What would make Doashime far more enjoyable would be multiple level layouts. I feel like all the elements in the game are fine, but they are compacted into one level that’s too small to let the game breathe and be enjoyable. What about a 5 door trains with two conductors? 7 doors with three conductors? That’s where variety could have elevated this experience.
As it is, Doashime is difficult to recommend. It is a hardcore puzzle game, with a basic aesthetic and game mechanics that feel unfair half the time. Only the hardcore crowd need apply, but if you do, there’s a decent leaderboard challenge awaiting you if you are brave enough.
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