Kena: Bridge of the Spirits is the first game that the Ember Lab developer has created, but you could not know when looking at him or playing. It does not make anything dazzling or revolutionary in terms of real gameplay, but it is a solid setback to the structures of the Games of the Nintendo 64 era with an incredibly represented story in which you want to spend a lot of time.
Ember Lab used to be just an animation and digital content study before this first game, a fact that you can certainly believe after seeing Kena cut scenes. They are nothing less than surprising, and if the game had the option to see all the animated scenes one after another, you would think you re watching a movie.
That dexterity of the animation also extends out of the cutting scenes and in the world of Kena itself. It seems that the characters and environments could have been taken directly from a Disney or Illumination movie, especially the adorable Rot characters that we will arrive later, but there is a certain authenticity in Kena that is ironically absent in many official video game adaptations of movies. It has all the characteristics of a game that has been adapted from something without any type of corny or discomfort when a character is not aligned precisely with your big screen versions.
Let s take Rot, for example, a collection of tiny beings with black hair and cursis noises that help Kena along the game as he finds more and more of them. The way that Rot smiles at Kena and frowns the others resembles something you would expect from a large eye pixar character. It is as if they had been created by a plane that is difficult to ignore once you become familiar with them, but the effect of rot is powerful in the sense that it is even harder to imagine. Kena without being followed.
However, a game can only be managed with their appearance for a while. While the players explore this world as Kena with the hope of guiding the spirits to the next stage of their trip, they will shoot arrows, will throw bombs and hit things with a cane. The skills that players unlock along the way with the resources obtained through fights and environmental discoveries allow progression paths that will vary slightly according to the game styles. Heavy and lightweight attacks combined with resources-based skills create a useful combat system, although somewhat repetitive. Add a good dose of riddles to solve and have a quite familiar experience.
However, what prevents combat from ponding too much is the difficulty of the game. His animation style and the simplicity of his combat are deceptive: the game is much more challenging than it seems. Play through the game in the difficult difficulty forced me to essentially use all the available reuse times with specific skills and attacks necessary to optimize the damage against different types of enemies. The stops and the management of shields became especially important both in normal combat and in the fighting head fights.
That s something else Kena does well: the boss fight. These moments are where the bright animation and the deceptively challenging combat are intertwined. With one, sometimes more main leaders in each act of KENA and several smaller heads scattered everywhere, Kena s more deserving than most games in a Boss Rush mode. The head of the first act teaches players the importance of learning patterns of movements in combat, but is the head of the second act, corrupt woodsmith, who really stands out more. Everything, from the sand to the choreography and the way the audio synchronizes during that fight, shows that Ember Lab was not only lucky with his first game and that he knew exactly how it should be a memorable moment.
Things get a bit rare from time to time with respect to Hitboxes and physics, but that is expected from any game. The grip attacks of enemy bosses are particularly generous with their hitboxes and, sometimes, they may seem unfair, although it is more to learn to play according to the rules of the bosses instead of that things are simply inconsistent. The way the game makes Kena stop in the impact after jumping from any remarkable height even though you damped your landing with a double jump also seems to break an unwritten rule on the physics of video games. It could also have been more useful with regard to tutorials, since it never teaches you how to block enemies, although that s something you can definitely do.
Kena may not be perfect, but it is far from what you would expect from the first game of a study. It is a show to look without being too long or too short, and it is one of the rare examples of a game that deserves a cinematographic adaptation, not the other way around. Maybe more than anything else, it s a game that puts the bar very high for whatever Ember Lab wants to do next. Rating: 4.5 of 5 KENA: Bridge of Spirits is now available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC platforms. The game was reviewed in PlayStation 5 with a review code provided by the editor.
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