"Kena: Bridge of Spirits" Review

Available for: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Microsoft Windows (via Epic Games Store)

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

If you look through reviews of today's subject, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, a trend you'll notice is that most of them tend to start with a reference to developer Ember Lab's history as an animation studio. Responsible for some famous animated features such as a fan film related to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Ember Lab has only just now stepped into the game industry officially, and as all the reviewers say, their pedigree in animation shows. But we'll get to that in due time. I can't say that I was actively looking forward to Kena or anything, nor do I think many others were. Revealed in a Sony State of Play event earlier this year, the game looked incredible (Ember Lab's pedigree once again shining through), but there wasn't much information about what it was, or what kind of game it would be. So I basically forgot about it until the reviews started pouring in. "Oh," I thought, "that was the one that looked good." The reviews were positive across the board, so I thought, "I don't have anything else to try out, so why not?" Usually when I build up to a summary of my thoughts in that specific way, that "so why not" is followed by something like, "I'm glad I did, because this game is an unbridled masterpiece that I would've missed out on if I hadn't given it a shot." But this time, the follow up to that "so why not" is a bit more hand-wavy. To summarize my thoughts before I start breaking things down specifically, I'll say this: Much like Ender Lillies: Quietus of the Knights, Kena: Bridge of Spirits has some serious problems that have to be addressed...but I also 100%-ed it, so I clearly liked it a lot in spite of those problems. Now, let's get started.

The best way I can think to describe the story of Kena: Bridge of Spirits is that it feels like a folk-tale. Not a lot of exciting twists and turns happen, but the story inhabits a rich world full of history and tradition, and it progresses in the semi-fable-esque way that most folk tales tend to progress. You play as Kena, a spirit guide who helps the spirits of the dead to move on from the world. At the start of the game, Kena is on a pilgrimage to a shrine high up on a mountain to seek the enlightenment necessary to become a better spirit guide, but she quickly realizes that the land surrounding the mountain has been corrupted by some kind of evil force brought upon a village and its surrounding areas by the restless spirits that once inhabited it. So, together with a legion of little plum-like forest creatures head-scratchingly called "the Rot," Kena ventures forth to seek these restless spirits, learn their stories, and help them to be at peace. As I said, this isn't a high-octane tearjerking narrative about the human condition or anything, it's more like a story being told by some villager about that time a spirit guide came around and did everyone a solid. I happen to really like stories that truly feel like folk tales, so I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it may not be for some. 

As for the characters you'll meet along your journey, none of them truly stand out. Much like in a folk tale, each character you meet gets just enough development for you to understand why they're suffering, but not much more than that. So, while I would have liked there to be a bit more development for these side characters, there's enough to get the job done, so I won't complain. What I will complain about, however, is the overall lack of development for Kena herself. The reason is simple: Kena is perhaps the most instantly lovable protagonist I've taken control of this year. Part of that is due to the animation quality, part of that is due to the performance given by voice actress Dewa Ayu Dewi Larassanti, but whatever the reason, she's just delightful. Some reviewers have touched on this already, but given the nature of her job, it makes sense that Kena would be a warm, kind person. And there's an early game example of this, where she confronts a pair of shy children who are hiding, and with the combination of animation and voice acting, the way she coaxes these children to come out and not be scared made me think "oh my god, that was so sweet!" That's just one example, but I hope it paints a picture of a character that you might want to get to know better. Unfortunately, aside from a tad bit of late game content, we never get to learn more about Kena as a character, and she really just falls to the wayside as the vessel through which we interact with the world. It's not a huge deal, I guess, but I was legitimately disappointed that she won't end up winning my "Protagonist of the Year" award because of something that easily remediable. 

If I had to summarize the gameplay in Kena, it would be a hand-wavy phrase like "simple until it isn't." Kena has a couple of tools at her disposal: her staff (which can be used as both a melee weapon and a bow), a bomb, and the rot she has following her. So aside from the rot, you can probably already imagine how the flow of gameplay might look: light and heavy melee attacks, bombs and arrows for chip damage from a distance, so on and so forth. But Kena also subscribes to the gameplay model that always gets a thumbs-up from me: engage with combat to survive combat. It's not as aggressive as something like Doom Eternal, since you can just try and chip the enemy down with arrows at the edge of a given arena, but that's still engaging with combat. The way this gameplay model is incorporated into Kena is through the rot. As you grow the amount of rot you have following you, you'll gain progressively more and more "rot actions." At the start, you can only have them bind enemies or heal you with nearby healing plants, but as you go along, you can unlock special attacks like having the rot form a hammer on the end of your staff for massive damage in exchange for "karma" (one of the game's "currencies"). But here's the thing: at the start of any given battle, the enemies will scare the rot away, meaning you can't actually use any of these special moves or heal yourself. So in order to be able to do these potentially life-saving things, you have to actively deal damage to enemies to give the rot the courage to join the battle. This is denoted by circles near your health bar that gradually fill up as you deal damage. When a circle becomes full, you're free to use whichever of the rot actions you currently have in your arsenal, but once you do so, you'll have to fill up that circle again. You start out with the ability to use just one rot action at a time, but if you seek out all the rot in the world, you can gain a maximum of 5. So if you really save up during a long battle and fill up all 5 circles before doing anything crazy, you have a lot more control over how the battle goes. You could just start wailing on enemies with special attacks one after the other, or if you've been struck down to low health, you can double down on healing flowers...though be aware, in any given battlefield, there are usually only two flowers at most, so as cliche as it is to say, approach any given battle like it's a soulslike and you only have two estus flasks. This mindfulness of rot actions and the amount of them you can pull off at a time doesn't really come into play in most battles, but when it comes to the bosses, mastery of your arsenal is vital.

If you look at Kena and think, "oh, this might be good for my kid," you aren't wrong on an aesthetic or graphic content level. But playing on normal difficulty, I have to say that the bosses in this game consistently mark a massive difficulty spike. It could be that on easy difficulty this isn't the case, but unless you're ok with having to shut down your kid's playtime because they're getting too frustrated or downright angry, I wouldn't chance it. Some reviewers have made that point, and while I don't think many of my readers have young kids, I feel like it's a legitimate thing I ought to put out there. But as much of a difficulty spike as these bosses are, they're also good at worst and excellent at best. The "good" bosses are the ones that aren't really a part of the story, and who come back as semi-standard enemies as the game progresses. These will typically come up while you're on your way to a plot point as a way of continuously testing your abilities (who knows how big the difficulty spike of the story bosses would be were it not for these smaller difficulty spikes along the way). The game doesn't point it out, but these bosses comes with a couple small glowing weak points, and the game trusts you to recognize them as such and act accordingly. Taking out these weak points will only drop a boss down to 50% or 25% health maximum, so you still have to fight it normally, but weak points are more or less conceptually tutorialized by these little hurdles. The "excellent" bosses, as I'm sure you've already gathered, are the ones you take on as part of the story. Every boss operates differently, has different weaknesses, and requires different tactics to take down, none of which are told to you. You have to rely on your skills, the knowledge you've obtained, and your ability to pay attention to what's going on and use your wits to defeat these bosses. In the most basic sense, this might entail looking at a boss and thinking "that ball around its neck...it's glowing...maybe I should aim for the ball." In a less obvious sense, this might take the form of my experience with a late-game boss whose name I won't say. The boss battle in question was against a flying spirit wielding a bow in a gigantic forest arena. The moment-to-moment of the fight involved sprinting between the giant trees dodging her arrows and firing arrows of my own back, all at breakneck pace. She seemed to dodge about 90% of the arrows I was shooting, but I could land an arrow or two if she was preoccupied with readying an attack. So, not a lot of damage being done on my part. But eventually, through trial and error I realized that she could be brought to the ground by landing only a few arrows in rapid enough succession. All of a sudden the breakneck pace of combat became even more aggressive on my end, and eventually this tactic of merciless arrow onslaughts would pay off every time she took to the air. It didn't make the fight easy in any sense, but through my own observations, I'd discovered how to win...it was just now a matter of actually pulling it off. It's simply excellent boss design, and what I want you to take away from this section, dear reader, is the trust the developers place in you to figure things out just by paying attention. 

That trust is the backbone of more than just boss encounters. It's also the foundation on which the game's puzzles are built. There's a little bit less to talk about on this front, because unlike bosses, once you figure out the solution, you've got it made and you aren't going to fail, but I can give one example of this trust in the player in action. Early in the game, I came across a massive lake with a waterfall at the end of it. To my right was a small island in the lake that clearly had an additional rot member on it. Wanting to add to my ranks, I leapt into the water and swam towards the island...unaware that in this game you can't jump out of water. So, defeated, I just swam back to where I was before and proceeded with the story. Fastforward a little bit and I ended up getting the bow ability and happening to return to that area. This time around, I noticed...something...on that island change as I approached the shoreline. Seeing that, I thought "huh...I just acquired something that hits things from a distance...that thing that changed is at a distance...I wonder what happens if I shoot it?" And sure enough, shooting that thing grappled me over to the island and I was able to get that new rot companion. Nowhere does the game tell you "hey, you can do this!" The developers simply trust you to be aware of your surroundings and use your noggin, and I have to respect it. 

But on the subject of respect, on the technical front, I can't really say I have much for Kena. Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. People don't cite Ember Lab's background in animation for nothing, the cutscene animations are first class, and they go a long way in selling the game's emotional moments. This is further helped along by a fitting, if somewhat unmemorable, soundtrack. The world itself is perhaps the most vibrant world I've seen since Horizon: Zero Dawn, which makes sense, considering this game was developed primarily to make the most use out of Playstation 5 hardware. The voice acting is great across the board, and when I say across the board, I mean even the literal children who voice some of these characters. I don't know if Ember Lab just happened to pick up the most talented children in the world or if the writers just wrote kid dialogue so convincing that it came naturally to two twerps they picked up on the side of the road, but another reviewer brought it up, so I was listening for it, and they do a really good job. And lastly, the game never crashed on me.

Unfortunately, that's where the positives end. That was a decently large list of positives, but as you'll soon see, the negatives sometimes get in the way of those positives. The biggest one is the game's overall performance. If you're one of the leprechauns who happens to own a Playstation 5, chances are good this won't be an issue for you, but I'm not one of you, and the fact remains that this game was clearly not optimized well enough for PC. I'm not what you'd call a "PC Gamer" (despite what my ratio of console-to-pc reviews this year might suggest), so I don't know what kinds of stuff I have in my rig. But I do know that when I ran the in-game benchmark to automatically set the graphical settings to match my hardware, it set the values to ultra on every front. In spite of that, in certain areas, performance absolutely tanks on PC. Thankfully, it's never in combat, but for instance, if you walk into the village that serves as the central hub and dare to turn the camera, it just looks like a total mess. The same can be said of the snowy part of the map, where the framerate drops down to barely-above slideshow levels. In most places, the act of turning the camera does tend to drop the framerate a little, just not as badly as in the village. And what's headscratching about this is the fact that it happens no matter the graphical settings. After stepping outside of the initial cave and thinking "eww!" I spent a good 20 minutes in my settings dropping certain values down to try and compensate. I never succeeded, so I figured it might just be something I had to deal with. But then I got to the village (which, I'll emphasize, has no npcs or anything actively moving that would place a burden on the system) and I thought, "no, I have to fix this," whereupon I spent a good 40 minutes continuing to toy with my settings. On the lowest settings, the problem was still there. Even when I reduced one of the rendering percentage details down low enough where Kena looked like a Nintendo 64 character, it didn't work. So I just said "screw it," ran the benchmark again, and suffered through it with all settings on ultra. All that stuff I said about the vibrance of the game world and the quality of the animations kinda comes with a pretty big asterisk, you see? If it runs this poorly on a high quality PC, I can't imagine it runs particularly well on the less advanced Playstation 4. Just a thing to keep in mind for the 99% of the human population who don't have a Playstation 5 and want scalpers to go hungry. 

Another caveat to the vibrance of the world is that a lot of areas can feel a little...overdesigned. This won't be a problem for you if you're just trying to get through the game and you aren't looking for secrets, but if you'll remember, I 100%-ed this, meaning I had to look in the teeeeeniest crevices for additional rot to add to my team, and the achievement for doing so isn't called "no stone unturned" for nothing. A particular area comes to mind as an example of this overdesigning: Taro's Tree. This area is littered with so much foliage and nature that, despite having less collectibles involved than most other areas, hunting for everything was a nightmare. In most areas, you simply look out for anything purple in order to find rot, but in this particular area, looking for them involves going up to literally every rock or stump you can see (and there's a lot of them) and waiting to see if a button prompt comes up, and that's before you get down to only one left and you have to start combing the area again and thinking "wait, did I already check here?". The Village also suffers from this problem, but more because of its increasingly labyrinthine nature as the game progresses. Now, given how gorgeous the game world is, I wouldn't dare to suggest that overdesigning is actually a bad thing. That's really not the issue, even though that's how I introduced the issue. With that in mind, I think a simple solution would be map markers that appear when you find a collectible/rot/whatever, so you have a solid indicator of where you've already placed your fine-toothed comb and where you might need to take a closer look at.

Unfortunately, even the great voice acting isn't immune from a caveat. The audio mixing in Kena is inconsistent, and it's at its worst in the "memories" that you can view...important character moments, so not ideal. I don't like to play games with subtitles on, so I ended up missing out on what was actually said in the earlier memories...and I kept forgetting to turn the subtitles back on, so every time a memory played I was having to do some serious auditory squinting to see if I could tell what people were saying. To close off the technical section, I did experience some light texture pop-in at times, and Kena is a bit prone to animation glitches.

That was a bit of a sour note to move into the conclusion on, but I don't want you to miss the forest for the trees here, dear reader. The poor PC performance and overdesigned levels made the prospect of 100%-ing this game difficult...but I still wanted to enough to make it happen. There's enough good in this package to make it all worth it even on something other than a PS5 (assuming you aren't super sensitive to framerate drops). There's an instantly lovable protagonist, well-acted and decently developed characters, simple-yet-satisfying combat, puzzles that treat you like the adult you likely are, and bosses that make the game worth the price of admission on their own. Sure, I was disappointed by how little I got to learn about Kena herself, and sure, this is a game that was clearly meant for a next-gen console, but there's just something special about Kena that has kept it in my head since the credits rolled. I'd say maybe wait for a sale if you're on the fence, but I think if you have the capacity to pick this first project from an animation studio up, you might enjoy it, warts and all.

Let us review:

Lack of development for Kena - 0.3

Poor PC performance - 1.0

Non-PC specific tech problems - 1.0

The final score for Kena: Bridge of Spirits is...

7.7/10 - Pretty Good

Good work, Ember Lab, good work