They can pick up and move things, which can be useful if Kena needs to jump to hard-to-reach spots. Kena can "collect" them on her journey, and they collectively come with an arsenal of helpful and essential abilities. They're small, furry, softball-sized beings that resemble round inkblots, but with limbs, eyes, and smiling mouths. Aside from her use of spirit energy, one of the coolest features deals with the companionship of a species of creatures called the Rot. Like the combat, the entire system of gameplay for Kena feels diverse enough but also efficient and clean. Kena's task is tall, but she also had plenty of tools to get the job done. Even corrupt areas carried a sort of somber beauty about them, with dark flowers that carried the aura of death and sadness embedded with glowing red orbs simmering with power that needed to be wiped out. Sunlight kissed the leaves spilling out of another tree trunk to my left, this one hollowed out and giving the illusion of green foliage pouring onto the rocks below. On the way to visit a village elder named Rusu, who lived on top of a mountain, I found myself running up a fallen tree trunk the size of a bus, latte-brown wood darkened with cocoa-brown swirls that were meant to twist up to the sky instead of sideways, toward my goal. The map of Kena's world is large and is a fortune of color and visual life. Kena's purpose is to visit the Mountain Shrine, which could hold the key to helping the troubled spirits and healing the village. The village is burdened with patches of mysterious, dark corruption that saps the color from the village and the vast lands around it, which Kena has to traverse during her journey. These are small details, but they all added up to the grander views the game had in store.Įverything opens up when Kena reaches her main destination: an abandoned village populated with lost spirits. The flap on her leather satchel flops up and down whenever she jogs or runs, as does her bob of hair on top of her head. Her eyes narrow and her mouth is in sync with when she yells with every swing of her staff, adorned with a blue crystal at the end. All of this looked amazing, especially when you stop to look at Kena's movement and design. It's refreshingly simple, with fast and strong attacks assigned to the right shoulder and trigger buttons, respectively, and the L1 "pulse" button becomes the trigger for a shield/block defensive feature. Following a warning, he conjures up some creatures for Kena to get her first taste of core combat. Kena meets a mysterious figure in this cave who gives the impression that she's not welcome (It's more than an impression the dude says, "You do not belong"). Since you're in a cave, it almost feels like a tease. That also opens up the first visual impression of the game in motion, as pulsing to brighten up the cave offers a taste of how perfectly the light bounces off the walls, off Kena herself, and off of the shallow, shimmering water she's standing in. It's often the trigger for major events and the core action required to begin or complete many of the game's puzzles. She begins her journey in a dark cave that can be illuminated by the first (and probably most important) of her magical abilities: a pulse of azure spirit energy that grows to have a variety of functions beyond simply lighting up blue crystals. After a brief introduction, you start in the boots of Kena, a spirit guide whose life mission is to help usher troubled or stranded spirits into the afterlife. If you've watched enough of these types of characters in TV and film, there's a visual bounce to them that, when it's good, sets up shop in front of your mind's eye and can hold its gaze for the entirety of a journey, whether it's for a 30-second spot or several hours at a time.įor Kena, that visual richness is turned all the way up. This is the maiden voyage into gaming for Ember Lab, a Black-owned, Los Angeles-based indie studio that specializes in creating characters for animated commercials and movies. The world of Kena is one of beauty, magic, exploration, and heart, and it's one of the most engaging quests you will find on the PS5. It's become trite to talk about how good a game looks in this next-generation age because practically everything can look astonishing, but for titles like this, starting the discussion here can't be helped. One thing I will remember about playing Kena: Bridge of Spirits is how I kept stopping what I was doing to just stare at it, listen to it, feel it, and visually drink it in again.
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