![]() It’s a good thing, then, that the shooting works so well. Her twist is delivered much later, and while it’s serviceable in the grand scheme of things, it means you spend at least the first five or six hours - more than half of my total playthrough - dodging and shooting posessed bark without having a solid grounding in what exactly brought Kena to this forsaken land. Kena’s own story, perhaps appropriately given her career as a medium, takes a backseat for a solid chunk of the game while you resolve the villagers’ torment. You’re usually only dealing with one particular villager’s torment at a time, which provides a chapter-like structure to Kena‘s narrative. The mountain and its surrounding forests and villages have been corrupted throughout, with the ghosts of tormented spirits left behind for a multitude of reasons - grief, an inability to cope with change, or simply refusing to accept the reality of change. You’re not given an enormous amount of detail from the off, and your first introduction to the village is via a masked elder figure, voiced by the peerless Masashi Odate. You play as Kena, a spirit guide who is en route to a nearby village. ![]() Masks are a heavy motif in Kena: Bridge of Spirits, which is fitting given Ember Lab’s prior short film for Majora’s Mask. But it does have many moments of childlike wonder throughout, even if there are parts where Ember Lab’s inexperience and the natural first-game woes disturb that charm. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is not a game made for children. It is persistently adorable, from its Princess Mononke-style Rot spirits, to the way Kena herself flows in combat, the impressive fidelity of the world’s lighting, foliage and village design, and the consistently pleasant nature of almost everything you do. It’s the sort of game that you’d see in a shop window, at least pre-COVID. That extends not just to Kena‘s character design, which echoes some of the best Dreamworks films more than Studio Ghibli’s work, but the animation and motion underpinning it all. And fans of Horizon Zero Dawn‘s archery will be exceedingly comfortable with the combat.īut Kena‘s strength - both immediately apparent from the day the game was revealed and through any cursory check of Ember Lab’s history - is the craft of its world. Rocks for climbing are stained white, straight out of the Uncharted playbook. And if you’re looking for Ghibli-level inspirational narratives, you won’t find much. Some of the controls are prohibitively archaic. ![]() The environmental puzzling drags on, returning to its own tricks far too often. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is not a perfect game by any means. The village and the “hub” of the game, although you won’t spend that much time in the village itself as you will the surrounds. ![]() They could leave it at that, and doors industry wide would open for them, if they haven’t already. Give us a little more support and funding, and just imagine what your IPs could look like.” “This is what we can do,” such an email or message might say. Ember Lab emails footage from Kena, with an attached pitch, to publishers of their choice. ![]() (They’re not entirely new to video games or the space though the studio were responsible for the groundbreaking Majora’s Mask animated short a few years back, and the anime, sci-fi inspired Dust.) I’m only describing Kena: Bridge of Spirits in such a brusque way because it reflects what will happen in the coming weeks and months, if it hasn’t been already. That’s not a criticism, and it’s not meant to undermine or demean the work of Ember Lab’s first foray into video games. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is what I’d call a “You Should Give Us Money” project. ![]()
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