KENA: BRIDGE OF SPIRITS
D-pad to don a mask. Predictably, it turns the environment blue and highlights your destination in yellow, but in doing so it locks you into firstperson mode, as you scan the horizon for the marker before you take it off. In other words, you get to enjoy Kena’s lush environments in all their glory as you explore, rather than looking at the world through an ugly filter to navigate it efficiently.
A few technical gremlins during our Parsec playthrough might well account for a slightly awkward-feeling double-jump; otherwise Kena herself is a pleasure to control, moving briskly and nimbly without feeling either skittish or burdened by realworld physics. She’s a robust fighter, too, equipped with a handy dodge-roll and wielding a staff with which she can launch quick and strong attacks using the right bumper and trigger. That frees the face buttons up for Rot abilities, though you won’t be able to rely on these all the time. Rather, they’ll become available once you’ve strung together a succession of blows. One early technique enables them to form a living projectile, whirling around within a blue aura that you can steer with the right stick.
Though regular staff attacks will largely suffice for the rank-and-file opponents, this particular move comes in very handy against mid-bosses such as the Kappa, which tunnels into the ground and emerges elsewhere, shooting out fiery projectiles once enraged. It’s useful, too, against the brutish Wood Knight, which has blobs of glowing sap across its gnarled torso, making him reminiscent of Resi 4’s Regeneradores. The Rot can bind him just long enough for you to take aim at those luminescent weak points. Still, for a big chap he can certainly move, charging forward at pace and hurling a club made from a large chunk of tree bark. Fortunately, Kena is also equipped with a bubble shield – ideal when you haven’t quite got the timing of that dodge-roll down. And when deployed at just the right time, it doubles as a parry, giving you a brief window to strike back against your now-vulnerable attacker.
With respawning grunts to consider (you need to build up your Rot powers to purge the plant-like growths from which they emerge), enemy encounters are more involved than you might expect. And, in the case of the boss fights, they’re certainly more intense than we’d anticipated, even if the challenge isn’t exactly Miyazaki level. The aim, studio co-founder Josh Grier tells us, is to “make every encounter meaningful”, rather than to allow combat to be a trivial but mildly annoying obstacle to exploration. You won’t be interrupted quite as often as in games of this ilk, in other words, but when you do, you’re going to know about it. And you won’t simply be able to brute-force your way through the encounter by button mashing.
If during combat Kena feels like Jade meets Aloy with a bit of Kratos DNA, her next ability all but makes her a female Link. There’s a sense of ceremony to the introduction of her bow – which is to say there’s an extended cutscene to sit through, in which our hero is invited to “feel the energy of the mountain” before she can try it out. Though she can conjure arrows from thin air, you have to wait for her spirit power to regenerate; all the more incentive not to loose off a series of quick shots but to hold your nerve and charge your bow for more precise and deadly strikes. That’s easier said than done when a boss is sprinting at you, but then drawing that ethereal bowstring back while jumping slows everything down, giving you longer to fine-tune your aim.
Yes, that’s something else we’ve seen before – as is the moment we aim at two targets on either side of a wooden bridge to lower it over a chasm. But while prevailing game design wisdom says it’s wise to try to do one thing extremely well for your debut game, Kena: Bridge Of Spirits suggests doing several things competently is a worthwhile alternative. Assuming it can sustain the character and colour of the early game for its duration, there’s every chance that the rot won’t set in. Those portly little guys could really use a new name, mind.
The aim, studio co-founder Josh Grier tells us, is to “make every encounter meaningful”