It took me too damn long to get around to finishing Kena. I just kept getting torn between the core story, the various collectibles, and other games competing for my time. A full year (and about 28 hours of gameplay) after I initially picked it up though, it's finally time to write something up about it.
ARRIVAL OF A SPIRIT GUIDE
In Kena: Bridge of Spirits you play as a teenager far too much work to do. As a spirit guide, Kena seeks a mystical mountain shrine. On her journey to it, she's charged - by a spirit- with a quest to bring peace to the ruined village at the base of the mountain. It's an epic task; everywhere she goes, the world is covered in corrupted pustules full of evil creatures that seem to want her dead.
This is probably a good time to mention that everyone you encounter in the game is a spirit. Within the game's world, the dead linger as spirits if they have unfinished business, and Kena's job is to help them find peace.
She does that with the help of Rot, adorable little blobs that react to Kena's instructions. Throughout the game, you'll use Rot to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and rejuvenate the land. There are 100 Rot to find in the game, which each have a charming little animation when they're discovered. You can also unlock various hats for your Rot buddies, most of which are pretty adorable.
Along her quest, Kena will also meditate, shoot things with her spirit bow, and indiscriminately throw glowing sticky-bombs at stuff a lot too. There are plenty of timed agility puzzles, hidden collectibles, and unlockable cosmetics - enough to keep completionists busy for a while.
WHAT CAME BEFORE
Kena was the first major game from Ember Lab, a studio that has a background in animation, not video games. This shows, which I mean in the best way. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a beautiful romp through a gorgeously realized world, and Ember cut no corners in conceptualizing and breathing life into that world in a way that is a joy to play. In many ways, playing this game feels like playing a Miyazaki movie through a Pixar lens.
Ember worked with a Vietnamese studio called Sparx to produce some of the art for the game, and used ancient Bali and Japan as inspiration for the world. This comes across in the look and feel of buildings, runes, shrines, and flora throughout the game, and also characterizes the look and feel of the game's many foes.
As a piece of feminist culture, this game is powerful. Picking a teenage girl as the game's protagonist was sort of a risky move for Ember Lab - a bigger studio likely would have switched Kena to a male character or added a male option to "broaden the target market" or some nonsense. Kena is an incredibly strong character (literally the hero who saves the village) who spends much of the game fixing the problems of adult men and then helping them get over their failings.
THE END OF THE JOURNEY
In a way, Kena: Bridge of Spirits feels a bit like a detective story. The game takes place in the wake of a horrible tragedy involving an explosion at the mountain peak, the details of which aren't fully revealed until the end of the game. It adds a certain melancholic beauty to the game when you realize that the town you're saving is dead, and cannot come back. The ghosts that inhabit it certainly appreciate Kena's efforts, but there's a sense of loneliness that feels palpable as she explores a world in which she's the only living person - a traveler in a literal ghost town.
In terms of genre, this is a combat-focused action-adventure game with RPG elements - I would compare it with something like Zelda (similar balance of combat/exploration) or Bloodborne (challenging enemies you can learn and anticipate) in terms of gameplay. Coming from a studio that hadn't made a game before, I expected the game to be buggy or unsatisfying, but I was happily mistaken on both counts.
In my playthrough I didn't really encounter any major bugs, and found my gripes with the combat to be mostly my own fault. Some of the boss battles are pretty challenging, specifically around mechanics (like counter-attacking) which require precision timing. I gave up on fully completing this game's "challenge mode" but still pushed myself to finish the main story and most of the collectible content.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits does an excellent job of showing that small studios can produce fantastic, beautiful games. It's also a testament to the power and freedom a small studio has, to the narrative risks that a larger studio wouldn't take, that gives me hope for the future of the medium. It also scratched a certain Zelda-itch for me in a way that the (immense open world) newer Zelda games haven't, which I think says something about the strength of building games with a limited and focused scope. Without going into spoilers, I found the ending to be a perfect balance of satisfying and tragic. In short, I found this game to be incredibly underrated, and give it ten adorable hats out of ten. Go check it out!
