Kena - Bridge of Spirits (2021)

Fun, beautiful, touching. Simple, but intriguing. Kena has a welcoming vibe, although it is not without challenges.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a 2021 action-adventure video game developed and published by Ember Lab. The story follows Kena, a young spirit guide who uses her magical abilities to help deceased people move from the physical to the spirit world.

Review

Setup

Version: PlayStation 5

Difficulty: Spirit Guide

Total playing time: 15 hours (based on PS5 save stats)

Comments

I liked the atmosphere the game sets up for you. There is not much explained at the beginning, but the gameplay and story start quite intuitively. After a while, though, I felt like not enough information was being given. Sometimes that was good, and made me curious, and sometimes it did not match expectations and made for frustrating moments.

The game vibe is positive and very chilling. The scenery is beautiful and the overall vibe feels “zen”. Although it is a game dealing with death and the passing of spirits, so it can be hard for some characters in key moments.

In the end, Kena’s positivity had an impact on me, and I loved to be a part of that experience. The overall subject of the game for me is appreciation for what we have, and willingness to learn and let go of mistakes, and I found that beautiful.

The skills we get along the way are not all too exciting, but some of them matched my play style, and so that was enough for me. I ended up the game without even unlocking all of them, but also it was not necessary. One of the later skills we get, through the story, is the ability to “dash”. This was a cool mechanic that was both used to progress in the story by reaching out some new spots, but also as a fighting move. I think it was a missed opportunity to have previously unreachable spots (with proper indication!) be made reachable.

One of the problems I had with the game, even though it is not a big deal, is that everyone you interact with is dead. At the beginning, the game does not make it clear. In fact, I am convinced that it even misleads the player through some dialogue. For example, at the start of the game we find two siblings who are lost in the forest. They ask for help to find their older brother Taro, and promise to help Kena get to the mountain shrine if she finds him. We start the search and eventually reach the Village, where we meet the elder Zajuro, who tells us, directly, that Taro is a corrupted spirit that needs help to pass on. He also tells us that we must help the two siblings, “as it will be hard for them to understand their brother is gone”. Turns out, the siblings are also dead, so is Zajuro. And so is everyone else in the Village. Since this is a fantasy world where we get Rots that are fantastical beings but are able to interact with us, it is hardly intuitive that the siblings have also passed away and are just spirits. They can hug the Rot and interact with the world, even though they are not corrupt. So I found this initial detail form the game to be misleading and a bit cheap. Nevertheless, it is not a huge deal and does not impact the gameplay, it was just a minor annoyance from my side.

Story

We play as Kena, a spirit guide with the job of helping spirits who are having trouble leaving the physical world after passing away. The story progresses as we learn more about the village that Kena arrives in, and how we can help the spirits of that village pass on to the spiritual world. During her whole journey, Kena keeps finding small cute creatures called Rot, and they follow and help her face the challenges on her path.

Kena finds out that some people were hit by a catastrophe like event, and little by little finds details on how that event came to be. The village exists nearby a sacred mountain shrine, where a godlike creature existed. The mountain and the Rot God creature were part of a natural cycle, which impacted the village and its people. Some people got sick, and food was getting scarce, and so a few people tried to solve the problem in different ways, but all perished. One of them, Toshi, decided to go up the shrine and slay the creature, who he thought was the cause of the problem, ignoring the ancient wisdom that it is all part of a cycle and that the villagers should have tried to find a new home.

Toshi ends up causing a huge explosion that wiped out everyone around. His spirit could not face the truth, and got corrupted, spreading this corruption around the mountain, forest, rivers, and village. Kena eventually clears all the corruption away and faces Toshi to make him see that his actions were wrong and based on fear, but nothing will change what happened, so he needs to let go. Toshi finally accepts his fate, and that of his people, and passes on to the spirit realm. Kena then delivers all the Rot she found along the way, that were spirit splinters of the Rot God, and they combine themselves to be reborn once again, starting the cycle of healing.

Characters

Kena is lovely! I really loved how genuinely nice and polite she was throughout the whole game. She always had a positive attitude, and the way she connected with the spirits or interacted with the Rot and the nature was nice. I do not know how to express how much I liked her and her behavior without being repetitive, but she was portrayed in a very altruistic manner and had a positive impact on me.

I did not find that her voice matched very well with her visual, it felt as if she sounded a bit older than the character looked like, but this was a minor problem. I also thought the game could have gone into more details on the situation with her father, but it seems this lore part was dropped mid-to-end-game.

The supporting characters are ok, the voice acting was well done. But they had such little screen time that I think it was not enough to make them very memorable. They mostly popped up to give context to what had happened in a particular area of the village, and to help guide Kena into the right direction. But other than the Rot, they did not stand out for me.

The Rot, however, were so fun to watch in detail. How they behaved in different places: hanging from mountains, meditating near beautiful views, bathing in rivers, etc. Finding them all sorts of different cute hats also had its fun moments and got my wife’s attention. She would always stop what she was doing to burst out how fluffy each of them were whenever I found a new one.

Difficulty

The game is mostly a chill adventure full of exploration and searching for hidden Rot characters and their hats. Every once in a while, a random encounter will be way harder than previous encounters, and remind you that you still have some challenge to beat.

Challenge chests are found randomly in the map and can range from very easy to somewhat challenging. Meanwhile, the challenge totem unlocks different stages that can range in challenge level, but most require quite a bit of ability to control your aim and resources. These totem challenges were quite fun and actually challenging. The archery ones were quite fun. I think I only managed to pass one of these challenges with best score at the first try. However, some of them were clearly made to waste some of player’s time, and I did not care for those, which is sad because that’s how you unlock different outfits for Kena to wear.

Some bosses were interesting, but the harder ones for me seemed to be the ones who just had too much HP. Perhaps I missed some mechanic at some point that should be used in these cases, otherwise it was just a matter of me versus my patience to wait for the right moments to attack while chipping away small chunks of HP instead of going in full brute force and dying.

One of the things I do not like in games in general is when a puzzle is presented that the character is not yet capable of solving. As a player, I can not know that it is unsolvable until I give up and progress through the game to find new skills that can then be used to solve it. The fact of having to give up makes me frustrated, because without clear indication or hints that those are not solvable yet, it just feels like I am not good / smart enough to figure the puzzle out, while also having me spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. This game has at least one of these, but I guess that can be acceptable once in a 15~ hour-long game.

Regarding bosses, I think the Mask Maker was the best one for me, as it was fun and came up with mechanics not seen before. It was both challenging and innovative for the gameplay seen so far.

Graphics

The graphics were simple, but charismatic and colorful. They were not made to be ultra realistic, but that is fine, because it fits the general chilling vibe of the game. Still, as usual, I enjoy landscape views, or any moment that puts me on high spots with clear vision of a huge area.

The cinematics actually had better graphics. Unfortunately, when you grow up watching Blizzard level cinematics, it is hard to compare others without being unfair. Still, I thought they were pretty good, not in a Blizzard way, but more like in a Pixar’s movie way.

In some parts of the map, sometimes a bit hidden away, we can find meditation spots. They increase Kena’s maximum HP, so it is important to find them. But more than that, they give us a similar-to-panoramic view of the landscape around the area, and quite beautiful to watch.

The menu is intuitive, and mostly not necessary to use. You rarely get access to new skills and can open it up to unlock them. The minimap is also okay, but you can only access it through the menu, and I wish we had an option to enable it in game HUD.

Regarding the different areas in the map:

The first map is restrictive, and you have to slowly clear your way by eliminating the corruption in different parts of the forest so that you can proceed.
The second map is the other way around, basically an open world, and there is so much available at once to explore. It is also here that I encountered the first game glitches. There were a few FPS drops as well as visual map bugs and maybe hitbox issues, since at one point a huge part of the map just did not load (e.g.: mountains, rocks, and huge machinery). This was quickly solved by loading a quicksave, but other issues happened where I could pass through physical objects, like stones or huge wooden things, that were supposed to either stop me from going somewhere or help me get somewhere, in both cases the glitches made it annoying. In one specific instance, the game actually crashed and I had to start the app again.
The “third map”, if we can call it that as it was basically a snowy area that we did not spend too much time in, had severe FPS drops at the beginning, but it seemed to get better later on. Not sure if related to me restarting the game in different day, or if it just got bad at specifically the beginning of it.

One small problem was that the map markers for the next quest could appear on your minimap before you actually started the quest. This caused me some lost time because I walked around the map a lot when noticing three blue marks had appeared. I checked each one trying to figure out what did they mean and why couldn’t I get into those areas, before giving up and moving forward to start the quest, only to then be granted access to all the places.

Sound & Music

The music is heavily using Indonesian gamelan, which is something I was not familiar with before, and was quite enjoyable. It matched the environment and vibe of the game very well, but I do not see myself listening to it during a workday.

Other sounds and voice over were well done, and there is no major compliment or complaint from my side. Except more than one voice (while well voiced over) not feeling like they matched their characters.

Pros

Cute Rots and hats! Collecting them was fun and rather de-stressing. Usually could trust a round of Kena and exploring the map around for them to be enough to improve my mood after any stressful day of work
Positivity, politeness, and altruistic portrayal of Kena’s character was motivating and influential for me
I could see the game being open to receiving people who have not played many games before. Although some parts can be tricky due to the ability required with the controller

Cons

I feel a bit sad after the game ended. While we did release many conflicted spirits to follow their path and pass on, it also felt like nobody else was around to notice what has happened. After the end, Kena is basically alone and the Village is just going to be ruins, since there is nobody else alive to live in it
I might have missed something, or Kena’s storyline regarding her dad just ended abruptly or was dropped entirely. Maybe she came to terms with it after learning lessons together with the spirits, but I expected something more direct