In a short introductory text, Kena: Bridge of Spirits outlines its world, and then throws you directly into it. A beautiful forest, and you, Kena, a spiritual teacher. You know what’s going on: souls are mostly happy to go to their final resting place, although some are not, because of their regrets, they are bound in the forest. Kena’s job is to find them, hit them hard, and then help them move on. There is also a physical form of mental negativity-decay, which infects the forest and attracts other unhappy spirits. However, for Kena, decay is also a friend. Whenever she finds a little rotten creature, they are happy to help her in battles and various puzzles.
Puzzles may be a broad term for what you do outside of combat-in most cases, decay will bring misplaced objects (such as platforms or energy crystals) to the right place for you to use. At some point, the decay can also temporarily transform into a large creature, rather than being able to clear the decay blocking the path. However, in general, you will walk through the forest until you reach a large, decaying clearing, an enemy will appear for you to defeat, and then you will cle ar the rot by destroying a large decaying flower.
Some of these areas will eventually contain a boss-it’s hard to say where, making boss fights look less like special occasions, but more like a way to break the tediousness of fighting the same enemy in every open space. Enemies will drop soul souvenirs-once you have collected enough souvenirs, you can summon souls, deal with their protests in the old-fashioned way, and let them find peace.
Although Kena is also released on PC, it feels like an outright PlayStation game-indeed it is reminiscent of Sony’s blockbusters in recent years. I am surprised that Sony has not yet acquired developer Ember Lab. Of course, games are not created out of thin air, but if you have played quite a few games before, you are likely to be tired of repeating old ideas here.
This is a complicated topic, but I need to mention it to illustrate my problem with Kena. This is a game that offers beautiful replicas of Zelda, Uncharted, Wudao, and Pikmin, gliding through in its 10 to 15 hours of running time. But playing Kena becomes very boring, very fast. Due to my lack of patience with mechanically sound but overly familiar games, I might make mistakes, but Kena guides you smoothly from one end to the other, so that I play it like on an autopilot.
Crossing is the most important part of the game-you can navigate the forest by slightly jumping on the platform and climbing on all the ledges marked with splashes of white paint. You restore the opening mechanism of the ancient gates and defeat their guardians to reach your next goal. This is not a game with many different actions-Kena wants you to wonder where to find something, not what to do with it. But this is where I failed. It borrowed a lot of ideas—climbing in Uncharted, shooting bows and arrows in God of War, the number of collections almost everywhere—but none of them were in a way that made me think Ember Lab knew what it was. Present a good puzzle, or an interesting platform sequence. They borrowed something that was undeniably effective and will work again, but failed to give it much charm or purpose.
Kaina also felt very unbalanced. With just a few buttons, the standard encounter is over, but boss battles always require me to try multiple times, because no matter how your heroine can withstand three blows, the enemy can pounce on you from a ridiculous distance. There is a cunning and ineffective parry, and fighting will eventually consume energy.
Those 3D Zelda are more from that kind of battle, but Kaina doesn’t have a game like Breath of the Wild. You can gain more skills for you and the rotten objects by collecting more rotten objects to obtain rotten objects levels, and performing certain operations will gain karma, which you can spend on new skills. You can complete the entire game without looking for these collectibles, but without some new skills, Kena will become too repetitive. I don’t like tying game progress to collectibles, but unless you are a completionist, there is no reason to collect everything.
There is no doubt that this is a beautifully-looking game-after all, Kena was made by the animation studio behind the superb Majora’s Mask fan short film. But, despite its beauty, I worry that Ember Lab just took a little bit of what everyone liked and put it into their game. Their characters are probably designed for some kind of Pixar charm, but it is difficult for me to judge whether all these characters with Japanese names are really Japanese. This is a small problem, but the bigger problem for me is Kena’s portrait. The game uses statues and portraits of Japanese Inari and Jizo, as well as the influence of Bali, and mixes them together, presumably because they look cool, and because of the lack of world construction, nowhere is quoted. When religious practices or ideas such as karma are used as game mechanics, I am always a little uncomfortable, and I am not bound by any meaning at all. You may not care, but in real life, these things mean a lot to people. From their resumes, Ember Lab is aware of this.
For me, Kena: Bridge of Spirits has a lot of first game syndromes—something that has the right idea but is weakened by execution. If it does well—given its pre-launch craze, I expect it will—that’s because we usually pay more attention to the appearance and mechanism of AAA than to innovative attempts. I’m sure that Ember Lab has a great game based on this, but that’s not the case yet.