Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (18th Apr. – 24th Apr., 2023).
There is something charming about Yoshio Ishī's minimalist style. The Hoshi Saga series proposed micro-puzzles from which silent poetry emerged. A few mouse clicks were enough to explore paper miniatures reminiscent of children's dioramas. The pronounced texture of the washi paper underlines the artificial quality of the puzzles and their ephemeral nature. Parameters goes in a completely opposite direction, as with a much colder concept. Instead of building a sensory and kinetic experience, Ishī boils down the components of dungeon crawlers to their bare essentials, encapsulating exploration, combat and grinding into a minimalist interaction. In some ways, Parameters is an attempt to return to the fundamentals of the genre, but without the ruggedness of the old games.
The progression is intuitive: to increase one's stats, to be able to face the more difficult boxes, it is necessary to gain experience, either by killing enemy blocks or by exploring empty ones. Some are accessible from the start, while others are locked. To open them, the player must use an iron key found on enemies. Parameters flows naturally and, as waverly_khitryy notes, is similar to an idle game in that the number of actions the player can perform in quick succession is limited by an energy bar. After a couple of clicks, the player has to wait for a short time before interacting further with the blocks. The game appears to be a sort of meditation on the dungeon crawler theme, but Parameters offers few subtleties beyond these basic elements. The various resources and statistics affect the progression, but there is no need for the player to devise any kind of strategy.
The order in which the blocks are explored or fought never matters, as a quick gold grind is enough to increase the various stats, bypassing the need for a level-up. This would not be a problem if the title offered some variation in the distribution of the blocks: Parameters, however, is a fixed experience. The board is always the same, with the same numerical values. One might have thought that the arrangement of the blocks was meaningful, that the chests could only be opened after exploring all the adjacent boxes, but this is not the case. Apart from the slight gratification of seeing the numbers increase, the experience is quite mind-numbing. Death is never punishing, as the player slowly regains his life, but it can lead to incompressible downtime. Again, this is not a problem in a meditative experience, but it also encourages the stultifying gold grind to buy equipment, which undermines any semblance of tension.
Parameters can be seen as a good imitation of the dungeon crawler gameplay loop, turning the passive sequences into mild dopamine rushes driven by the desire to complete the grid. But because they are drowned in an overly smoothed-out experience, they become more awkward than anything else, despite the game's brevity. For the rest, the title does not try to pretend to be what it is not: it is indeed a minimalist experience, in every sense of the word.
There is something charming about Yoshio Ishī's minimalist style. The Hoshi Saga series proposed micro-puzzles from which silent poetry emerged. A few mouse clicks were enough to explore paper miniatures reminiscent of children's dioramas. The pronounced texture of the washi paper underlines the artificial quality of the puzzles and their ephemeral nature. Parameters goes in a completely opposite direction, as with a much colder concept. Instead of building a sensory and kinetic experience, Ishī boils down the components of dungeon crawlers to their bare essentials, encapsulating exploration, combat and grinding into a minimalist interaction. In some ways, Parameters is an attempt to return to the fundamentals of the genre, but without the ruggedness of the old games.
The progression is intuitive: to increase one's stats, to be able to face the more difficult boxes, it is necessary to gain experience, either by killing enemy blocks or by exploring empty ones. Some are accessible from the start, while others are locked. To open them, the player must use an iron key found on enemies. Parameters flows naturally and, as waverly_khitryy notes, is similar to an idle game in that the number of actions the player can perform in quick succession is limited by an energy bar. After a couple of clicks, the player has to wait for a short time before interacting further with the blocks. The game appears to be a sort of meditation on the dungeon crawler theme, but Parameters offers few subtleties beyond these basic elements. The various resources and statistics affect the progression, but there is no need for the player to devise any kind of strategy.
The order in which the blocks are explored or fought never matters, as a quick gold grind is enough to increase the various stats, bypassing the need for a level-up. This would not be a problem if the title offered some variation in the distribution of the blocks: Parameters, however, is a fixed experience. The board is always the same, with the same numerical values. One might have thought that the arrangement of the blocks was meaningful, that the chests could only be opened after exploring all the adjacent boxes, but this is not the case. Apart from the slight gratification of seeing the numbers increase, the experience is quite mind-numbing. Death is never punishing, as the player slowly regains his life, but it can lead to incompressible downtime. Again, this is not a problem in a meditative experience, but it also encourages the stultifying gold grind to buy equipment, which undermines any semblance of tension.
Parameters can be seen as a good imitation of the dungeon crawler gameplay loop, turning the passive sequences into mild dopamine rushes driven by the desire to complete the grid. But because they are drowned in an overly smoothed-out experience, they become more awkward than anything else, despite the game's brevity. For the rest, the title does not try to pretend to be what it is not: it is indeed a minimalist experience, in every sense of the word.