Kena Bridge of Spirits Critique

Kena Bridge of Spirits is a game that focuses on a narrative and combat, and that is the critiera that is used in the critique and review. In short I think this is the type of game 10 year old me would have enjoyed and played on repeat, and that the 16 year old me would dislike.

Technical
The overall technical state of the port is excellent with only minor issues. The only real annoyance from a technical standpoint is that the ground movement of the rot is very awkward on a keyboard and mouse. You really feel the port aspect of the game here, but it is not an important mechanic and does not affect enjoyment significantly.
The camera has a tendency to snap to targets, which usually is not an issue. However when you get access to the bow the camera will snap away from the weak-spot you are aiming at causing you to miss. This is also an issue with a Rot action that target the wrong enemy. I died several times because of this feature, and I imagine playing at higher difficulties would highlight this issue even further.

Story
I never understood the story of the game, and found it very difficult to follow the overarching structure and goal. I think that Kena’s motivation and background is very poorly explained and showcased, and she feels like a blank character. The story of the village also feels very blank as you don’t have a lot of context to what happened. The village and the world got corrupted somehow, but it is all very vague and hard to care about. I wish the game put more effort into exploring Kena’s past. I would also like a bit more context on why this location is so special with more focus on the history of the village being told better. What happened to all of the other inhabitants of the village?

The presentation
The game simply looks stunning. The art-style is executed to perfection. The world looks incredible. The enemies look amazing. The strongest aspect of the game is its presentation and visuals by a large margin, and especially how it uses colour and lighting. It is super satisfying to watch the areas go from the corrupted grey-scaled palette to the vibrant and lush green world. The way that the game creates an atmosphere with the use of lighting and colours is simply masterful.
As much as I love the art-style and the visuals of the game I was ready for a change of colour palette and environment when Taro’s section ended. I was so happy when I entered Adria’s section and everything was an inferno. I loved the flame aesthetic and it was such a welcome change. I was so disappointed when the entire game reverted back into the green world without letting the fires and inferno properly provide a much needed contrast. The same experience happened with Toshi’s section where it begins with an ice and frost aesthetic, before it just goes back into the same old greenish aesthetic.
The game luckily has some caves that change up the pace, but I would have loved even more of them as they used lighting so well to provide a completely different atmosphere. I especially remember the hymns being chanted while you approach the village hearth, and that was such a good sequence in terms of visuals and sound.
The cut-scenes in Kena Bridge of Spirits are incredible good. They are of an animated movie quality. There are very few games I have experienced that does cut-scenes better. The game unfortunately struggles to properly connect the incredible cut-scenes together into a coherent and impactful narrative. They are like the rest of the game very pretty to look at and an impressive piece of artwork.

Gameplay
The gameplay is divided into combat, exploration, platforming and puzzles. The combat is the main part of the gameplay loop, and is what you spend most of the time doing. The exploration, platforming and puzzles serves as a necessary break from the combat and improve the pacing of the game. You need to calm down a bit after an intense combat encounter, and these elements provide that calm. The puzzles are so simple that they provide no real challenge, and the platforming is occasionally annoying, but never difficult.

The game progresses by unlocking core abilities through story, stat increases through exploration and ability upgrades through normal gameplay and exploration. The game also features some cosmetic unlocks; I really like these types of in-game unlocks. I would have preferred to know what outfits are available at the different challenges such that I could have worked toward the ones that I found interesting instead of having the blind unlocks. These blind unlocks felt underwhelming for me, and I would have liked to know what outfit is tied to what achievement. I think that would have greatly increased my enjoyment of the exploration and achievement hunting in the game.

Challenges
The game provides challenge encounters which use the previous environments and areas you beat in order to challenge you. These encounters provides a way to repeat areas and bosses. Overall I welcome the challenges, but I found that they communicated the state of the challenges and the rewards quite poorly. I frequently wished I knew how much better I was than the challenge baseline, or how far away I was from winning, how many waves were left and so forth.

The combat
The combat in Kena Bridge of Spirits follows a normal souls-like set-up, where you have access to light attacks, heavy attacks, heavy charge attacks, a bow, a bomb, a shield, a parry and Rot actions that functions as a special attack. You have your staff and your basic set of attacks, with some upgrades and that is it. You don’t have any equipment or notable combos to create more depth. This is a clean and simple approach to the souls-like genre, a genre that is very difficult to execute well. I don’t mind that the game has a basic combat system, I do however mind that it is poorly balanced and revolves so much around Rot abilities and parrying.
Parrrying is the name of the game. You can parry almost everything in this game. This creates a weird effect where game-knowledge and boss-knowledge is less important than just raw reflexes. If you have good enough reflexes you can sweep through the game, but if you don’t you will struggle because of how powerful the parry is, and how important it is for a lot of fights.
Rot abilities when you unlock them are very powerful; to the point that they are most of your damage. Your basic attack damage eventually becomes negligible and is really only used to charge the Rot abilities. There exists an upgrade for the parry that gives you a Rot action for each successful parry; this turns the game even more into a parry to win game.
Stun locking and animation locking exists to a large extent in the game, for both the enemies and the player. The player frequently gets stun locked if you miss a parry or get hit. The player can abuse the stun locking effect when the “heavy attack timing” upgrade is obtained; this ability flat-out breaks the game. You can stun lock half of the bosses for so long that the ability is ready to stun them again in an infinite loop before the enemies manages to react.
The difficulty range and difficulty scale in the game is fantastic, the easiest difficulty is quite forgiving and the hardest difficulty is quite punishing. Personally I did not find the hardest difficulty fun as the game bores me to death. The game relies heavily on repeated parrying and paying close attention to bosses’ attack moves and having good reflexes. Understanding of the bosses are not that important in the game in order to progress. If you got the reflexes you can beat most of the bosses without any understanding of their mechanics. I think this is a shame. Everything about the challenge just boils down to how to a reflex check, and that is all the challenge the game has to offer. The parry is executed well, and if you like games that revolves around parrying I expect that you liked this game.
In souls-like games the enemy design is very important in order to create depth and variety. The variety of the regular enemies are somewhat varied, but it does get stale after some hours as the core combat loop lacks complexity. I felt like it was a chore to get between the interesting fights and bosses. I like the re-purposing of bosses into regular enemies you meet in the world. The bosses in each section are discussed below for each section as this is what the game is all about.

• Kappa
  The kappa always stands in a pool, and can disappear into it before reappearing at another pool. It throws stuff at you before it disappear again. Eventually it will appear above you and throw a lot of stuff at you. I hate this boss-fight with a passion. It is poorly designed. It is poorly executed. I hate how it has so many invulnerable frames when it goes up or down into it’s pool. I hate how if you get too close to it too quickly it just goes down into its pool again without being damageable. This means that the entire fight is slow and grindy. I hate this so much that I lowered the difficulty from the master spirit guide to the expert spirit guide. This is one of the best examples of the game trying to bore you to death. This fight happened before I realised that parrying was the whole gimmick of the game, and I did not understand that at the time. Parrying projectiles did occur to me to be the only way to fight this boss, but my reflexes were not good enough to hit them consistently at the highest difficulty, and I tried dodging them instead.
• Wooden Knight
  The wooden knight is the first boss that utilise ranged weak-spots, which is a nice introduction and a cute little mechanic. The boss has several distinct attacks that it telegraphs that you can learn to predict in order to parry it; the most memorable of them being the ranged boomerang attack and the charged up slam of his log. I had a blast fighting this enemy as I was still learning the game. It was satisfying to finally get the win after dying several times. I thought the aesthetic and animation of this boss was excellent.
• Mage
  The mage is a very simple boss. I beat it without understanding the full scope of its mechanics. I just parried the ball of light, and it was easy and simple. It is a cool enough enemy when it works as a regular enemy later in the game. I like the simple design overall.
• Shrine Guardian
  The shrine guardian’s main mechanic is its summoning of minions, but it is a straight forward fight. It is essentially a oversized regular enemy. It is quite forgettable, but fine.
• Corrupted Taro
  Corrupted Taro is the pinnacle of the first section of the game. He will charge at you which you can either parry or interrupt with the bow if you hit his lantern that is hanging from his neck. I really like the theme and the move-set he uses, and I think it is a good design overall. I still grew bored of it and reduced my difficulty to normal (spirit guide) as I don’t find to much enjoyment in repeating the same perfect parries 20 times in a row. The animation and atmosphere of the fight is great, and while the design is fairly straight forward it is a great first major boss in the game. It is well designed, even though I don’t like it myself.

• Vine Knight
  The vine knight will extend a vine to stab you like a spear would. I did not like this fight, it has too few and simple mechanics. It goes into the parry and win folder in my memory.
• Stonewarden
  The stonewarden is invulnerable to attack unless you throw a bomb at him, which will make him vulnerable for a brief period. I found this to be a disappointing and boring fight. It is super repetitive while dodging and parrying simple fooder enemies. It primarily serves as an introduction to the mechanic of throwing bombs at certain bosses.
• Rot Eater
  I think this was a neat boss, but it was ruined by a bad port. Controlling the rot cloud in combat is simply terrible on a keyboard and mouse. I like the different design and concept for the boss, it was nice with a change from the previous repetitive mechanics.
• The village heart
  I loved the atmosphere and the music as I made my way across the environmental dangers, quite an enjoyable experience.
• Corrupt Woodsmith
  This is my favourite boss-fight in the game. The cut-scenes leading up to it is great. It feels so menacing and threatening. The cut-scene afterwards is also pretty great. The boss uses the mechanics of the previous bosses and areas, and I feel like I use the entire kit to win the fight instead of just parrying to victory or cheese my way with Rot actions. Great design. Great Art. Great Sound. This is the pinnacle of the game for me. This is what good design looks like, and what the rest of the bosses should have been.

• The hunter
  The hunter is one of the better designed fights in the game. It actually punishes you for only using parry and forces you to dodge sometimes. This is a great addition, and makes it much more fun to figure out the boss’ moveset and attack patterns.
  That being said the boss feels a bit janky and not up to the standard of the previous sections. The fight lacks proper transitions between the different movesets, attacks and reactions. The attacks suddenly starts, almost teleporting between different movement and attack sequences. When the boss flies around he will for example almost teleport to the charging arrow attack at a higher elevation. This means that a lot of the attacks just catches you off-guard, and it feels bullshit quite often. It feels like they added a lot of attack patterns but forgot to create animations for the in-between states and solved the problem by interpolating the location at the start of the next sequence and the current position to create a shitty animation that is very quick.
• The warrior
  This boss was so disappointing after the hunter. I am sure I have not even seen all of his mechanics, but I could just abuse the heavy charge attack and stun-lock him to invalidate the entire fight. I can’t judge if the mechanics are good or not. It is not up to me as a player to not break your game with basic mechanics. I found the platforming in this section to be worse than the previous sections as well. Generally speaking the polish seems to be lower at Toshi’s section with more annoyances, bugs and worse balance.
• The maskmaker
  This is another boss I don’t understand, but I just stun-locked into oblivion. I did not like his teleportation aspect as it is forcing even more reflex checks on the parry which I dislike.
• Corrupted toshi
  Yet again you can just stun-lock him and invalidate all of his mechanics. Right click stun-locks him and does damage equal to a Rot action several times over. I can’t be blamed for not trying to win when the game lets me do that. This is a fundamental issue that breaks the later stages once you get this upgrade. This is not me using a super cheesy tactic. This is simply me using the strongest basic attack I have over and over again to do maximum damage after I counter the moves the bosses make. The entire experience is ruined at this stage for me. I could go and not use the mechanic, but then it feels like I am not really trying to win, and that would invalidate the entire challenge of these bosses.
• Corrupt Rot God
  The corrupted rot god continues the downward streak of quality that the game experiences towards the end, it is awful in almost every aspect. The boss looks so much worse than anything else in the entire game. When you blink you go inside the boss and clip through it. I hate the archery focused mechanic of hitting the boss weak-spots several times, the first section is super boring. Then you get sucked into the boss where you are treated to regular enemies in a flat and dull environment, this second section is also super boring. The third section is a platforming section with terrible hitboxes on the platforms. The fourth section is also pretty terrible where the Rot actions on the back are hard to see and select. The worst aspect of the boss is not the terrible design and visuals, but that it resets you back to the start when you die. This is the boss-fight trying to bore you to death. It is not challenging, it is not interesting, it flat-out sucks. I turned my difficulty down to story-mode to get through this fight as I found it to be so stupid.

Overall thoughts
Overall I think Kena Bridge of Spirit is a decent game that has an extraordinary art-style and visuals. The combat is serviceable. The progression system is serviceable. The story is not very coherent, but there are some cool moments in it. Every element of the game feels like it exists within their own little bubbles without regard for the other game systems. That being said the game does not have major flaws that ruin the experience either. You can easily have a good time with the game if a reflex based souls-like combat system is what you are looking for. I think that the very large range of difficulty scaling means that the game can be quite good in terms of replayability for teens that wants to gradually get better. The game might serve a niche as an introduction into a souls-like genre that plays quite well on a keyboard and mouse.