Developed by: Ember Lab
Available on: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5
Today, video games are more popular and profitable than ever. As with everything though, when something is profitable, it attracts people who are just in it for a slice of the money. This, coupled with the rising costs of game development, means games today have a problem with originality. Companies tend to play it safe, releasing known successes with little innovation. The number of generic open world and first-person shooters out there is seemingly endless.
So when games like Kena: Bridge of Spirits come out, I always get excited.
Ember Lab is an animation studio with a love for storytelling that decided to try its hand in video games. Their first game, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, still borrows plenty from known successes, but with its own ideas, mechanics, and art style, it brings a fresh feel to it.
Its biggest strength, naturally, is its beautiful visuals and animations. Everything in the game is a satisfying sight, and the atmosphere it creates fits well with the game’s story. For the longest time, life had flourished, but the balance between nature and man slowly became disrupted and nature was forced to recede so that it may heal, leaving widespread famines in its wake. Kena is a spirit guide helping spirits of the deceased who are filled with grief and regrets move on, and with the high death toll, she has her work cut out for her.
The game is mostly linear with combat, platforming, and puzzles alongside plenty of optional goodies that can be found by exploring. At Kena’s side is the rot, a Pikmin-like species that follows her around and helps her move things and defeat enemies. As the game progresses, Kena also gains access to a bow and bombs, both of which bring forth a flurry of interesting mechanics.
The bow, for example, doubles as a grappling hook that can be used on blue flowers throughout the world. The bombs cause certain objects to float, creating lots of interesting puzzles and platforming sections.
I enjoyed exploring the world that Kena takes place in, and the experience was only enhanced by its excellent visuals and soundtrack.
When it comes to combat though, we have problems. Being a newbie developer, Ember Lab made a newbie mistake that I learned about when I played Super Mario Maker 2.
When making a level in Super Mario Maker, I would spend hours trying to get it to feel just right: not too easy and not too hard. The final product was always quite fun for me. However, when my friends would try it, it always felt almost impossible to them. That’s because I, the creator and playtester of the level, have a much more intimate understanding of every little thing in it. I knew exactly when to run, when to jump, for how long to hold the jump button, etc. because I had tons of hours of practice. My friends on the other hand were seeing and playing the level for the very first time. They had to learn all of that stuff on the spot or spend hours trying and failing it over and over again until they figured it all out. As you can guess, the latter isn’t very fun.
Unfortunately, that’s what Kena expects from you.
The combat is brutal and presents an almost Dark Souls-like experience. On normal difficulty, what I started the game at, the average attack takes away about a third of your health. That wouldn’t be a problem if it was pretty easy to not take damage, but it isn’t. Enemies don’t project their attacks well. What usually happens is they’ll wind it up nice and slow, but then strike with lightning speed and with timing that’s difficult to predict. Some enemies’ moves are also seemingly designed in such a way to throw the player off from what they’d expect. For example, there’s an enemy that’s a small, tough and very slow-moving rock that you defeat with bombs. It’s so slow, you’re convinced that all you have to do is keep a distance from it and you’ll be completely safe, but then it suddenly does a Sonic the Hedgehog spin dash that hits you from 30ft away. Who would see that coming?
Kena can dodge, but the distance she covers when dodging is often not enough to avoid attacks. She also has access to a magic shield, but it’s fragile and she takes damage anytime it breaks, effectively punishing the player for relying on it even a little. Access to healing is scarce; every battle has one or two flowers that the rot can use to heal Kena, but that’s all you get. Enemies on the other hand have lots of health and take forever to kill. Every fight becomes an annoying endurance challenge where you have to grind the checkpoint until you learn how to never get hit.
If it weren’t for the ability to switch to easy mode, I don’t think I would’ve made it to the end of the game.
The gameplay outside of combat, while very fun, also has a few design issues.
A good example is the aforementioned blue flower you can use to grapple. The developers didn’t want players to use the grapple in unintended places, which is understandable. However, the way they went about preventing the player from doing so wasn’t good. Flowers will only open up and allow you to grapple to them if you are in a spot in which the developers are ok with it. There’s no way to know where you have to be to get a flower to open up outside of trial and error, and this leads to occasional moments of frustration when trying to figure out how to proceed. In one particularly bad moment late in the game, you have to jump from the platform you’re on towards the flower to get it to open up, where you can grapple to it while mid-air. There are no visual indicators to help the player determine that’s what they’re supposed to do, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out.
The system for fall damage is also infuriating. When falling from a height, you either take no fall damage, or you instantly die. There is no in-between. Additionally, the game tracks fall damage not based on the player’s velocity, but rather the height at which they jumped from. This means trying to avoid fall damage by slowing your descent with a double jump (a very common trick in games with fall damage) doesn’t work. Even though she’ll have almost no downward speed, Kena’s legs will still shatter upon landing. Trying to get down from high places becomes tedious and annoying.
However, all of these problems become fairly easy to forgive because the game’s visuals and characters are just so damn good. Kena proves to be a great protagonist. She’s as badass as she is sweet and caring, and at pretty much all times I was excited to learn more about her. The spirits she meets all have relatable problems, filled with guilt over their actions, broken over a loss, or unaccepting of their inability to reverse the damage to their world. They’re the sort of problems many of us will likely face as the effects of climate change take their toll.
Kena helps us learn to be at peace both with ourselves and with the changes taking place in the world and to not fret too much, for it won’t be the last time life can thrive.
Summary
For their first game, Ember Lab did a great job with Kena: Bridge of Spirits. There’s plenty to pick on in the gameplay, especially in its needlessly brutal combat, but with its fantastic visuals and its great storytelling, Kena: Bridge of Spirits yields a fulfilling experience.