Kena: Bridge of Spirits
Kena is an absolutely gorgeous game that I've described several times as being like watching a pixar film. The visuals and attention to detail are just beautiful to watch. The gameplay is ok, although I really struggled to stay engaged after the first few hours. It's an "action adventure" game with melee and ranged combat. You play as a spirit guide, helping the dead pass on, and follow a (not very well written) main quest to help several spirits on their journey, mostly by smashing things.
Pros
- Looks like a Pixar movie
- Runs really well
- The rot are cute little things you can buy hats for
- The map tells you how many collectibles you've found in each area
- As you move around the environment, your Rot pals follow you not just on the road, but pop up around the scenery to watch you. For exmaple, if you're shimmying along a ledge, they all appear in gaps of the rock face and sit on the ledges
- There's so much thought and character put into the rot. As above - if you go down a lift, the rot sit on the edge. But they also flail their arms as it goes down and fall over at the bottom
- 5 difficulty levels if you find it too easy
- Lots of accessibility options
- If you struggle with aiming a bow on controller like me, there's that mechanic from Horizon Zero Dawn that lets you slow down time while aiming
Cons
- The combat starts out feeling good, but as soon as you run into boss fights you notice the pitfalls. Abilities are poorly telegraphed, the parry window is TINY and not displayed, too many stun locks and interrupts
- The story is badly explained and all over the place, it's just a string of going from one place to the next for a not very good reason. Partway through the game, Kena reveals that she's looking for the mountain shrine (before that, you have no idea why you're here). 2 kids agree to tell her where it is if she helps them find their brother. Partway through that, the other NPC starts talking about their brother's spirit as if he's dead, but no one said he was
- The ability upgrades aren't very interesting
- Combat has a HUGE spike in difficulty at the Sprout Guardian. Having only died once in several hours before that, he is extremely aggressive, requires perfect timing to dodge multiple attacks in a row, can kill you in two hits, and can teleport most of the way across the arena in one swing
- Several abilities mention parrying, but the game never explains what that is or how to do it. After practicing at it for half an hour, I still can't get it right, and it seems like it's a common problem. The parry window is tiny, and there's no hint from the game about when to parry. Having just come from all the Batman Arkham games, they know how to do parry well. This is just badly implemented.
- There is a fast travel system, but you can only use it when you're standing next to a fast travel point
- The environment between your objectives looks nice, but is very empty
- 10 hours long, so absolutely not worth €40