Indie Game of the Week 452: Kena: Bridge of Spirits

You know, it's funny. I played South of Midnight as part of a big push last December to squeeze in a bunch of 2025 games on Game Pass that, true to its name, seemed to pass most of us by and I remarked somewhere that it felt like a game out of time: something that used to be far more abundant as a default model of sorts for moderately high-budget/high-profile action-adventures around the early 2010s and has since become largely defunct as a construct. Turns out I'd completely missed that Kena: Bridge of Spirits was in the exact same boat almost five years prior—a game that breaks up its open exploration areas and traversal sections with the usual white-tinted climbing footholds and platforming with arena-style combat encounters that often involve tackling multiple waves of enemies one after the other. They even have a similar protagonist: a young woman motivated by family matters to use her burgeoning mystical powers to assuage the tortured souls of the dead that were unable to move on.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is the first game by Ember Labs, an outfit that had previously worked on CGI animation for various projects like commercials. The two founders had wanted to switch to video game production and finally were able to do so in 2016, leading to the culmination of this five year project. That confirms a couple of theories I had about the game, the first being its slightly antiquated model (where it was less so in 2016) and the way it has some amateurish flaws that don't necessarily drag the game down but make it feel a bit more... well, I want to avoid sounding patronizing, but "homemade"? Like how Outer Wilds had a few mysterious design choices that a big company like Ubisoft or EA probably wouldn't have slipped up on, but in some small way still added to the singular charms of the game in a manner that didn't detract too much in a purely mechanical sense. These flaws are especially evident when playing the game on its hardest difficulty setting, as I am wont to do whenever there's achievements/trophies on the line, because the margin of error is so slight when any boss or mini-boss can kill you in three hits that the iffy hitboxes and the wholly uncooperative third-person camera became just as deadly as the foes themselves.

Some days are so nice you just want to go outside and throw explosives at rocks to send jagged shards flying everywhere. A regular wholesome childhood activity.

I am putting the cart before the horse here somewhat though. Kena: Bridge of Spirits features the titular "spirit guide"—those capable of communicating and assisting the lingering dead to pass over to the other side—as she makes her way to a mountain shrine said to be a conduit to the afterlife. She does so ostensibly to improve her craft but also secretly harbors a regret that she lost her father, also her spirit guide mentor, at a young age before she could fully master her powers and was hoping for his reassurance and acknowledgement from the other side. However, the village guarding the shrine made some sort of spiritual faux pas and was wiped out by a calamity, filling the now empty homesteads with ominous red pustules and wandering hostile nature phantoms. There's a few lost souls filled with regret in particular that are linchpins of this plague that Kena needs to purify first before she can reason with the town's fallen leader who stands in the way between her and the shrine; you'll typically start at the village, head east into the forest or west to the farmlands, complete all your tasks there (including hunting for collectibles if you feel up to it; the game has plenty and at least most confer some sort of benefit to your fighting prowess), and head back to reveal more of the central hub. One such collectible is "spirit mail": by delivering it to its proper home, you open up a path to that residence and can purge it of its corruption for various gains. This has the knock on effect of making the village initially appear closed off and inaccessible but then it slowly opens up as you gradually dust off the figurative spectral cobwebs until it's returned to its cozy and welcoming, albeit still abandoned, original state. The beauty of the game's setting really shines in these various locations after fixing their problems, tied with the game's more subtle themes of environmentalism and living alongside nature instead of trying to control it; in conjunction with its vaguely Japanese Ainu vibe (with perhaps some SEA/Indonesian mixed in) the game starts to resemble Princess Mononoke with its aesthetic and narrative approach (as well as Kubo and the Two Strings, the similar character designs of which leaves no doubt in my mind that it was an influence).

I mentioned the combat and for the most part it's pretty engaging. Kena wields her staff like a weapon during these battles but it's not necessarily her most effective means of attack. As the game progresses you'll unlock a bow function and the ability to throw bombs, both of which have a few upgrades you can buy that significantly change up your tactics with them and often work well in tandem with the melee. For instance, the bow has a slow-motion upgrade that makes it much easier to aim for weak points (it automatically applies this even without the upgrade if you try shooting in mid-air, which I got very used to doing) while the bomb has an upgrade where, if you shoot at it before it explodes on its own, it'll spread to nearby enemies for an additional wave of damage. You'll learn as you play what new abilities and upgrades work best for, say, tackling a small but ferocious group of mobs or a single tough foe. The downside is that there's way more fighting than there are new upgrades to play around with and you'll encounter the few enemy types there are enough times apiece that these battles definitely start to drag a while. The boss fights don't checkpoint which makes them extra enervating on the harder settings where it feels like their health bars have been artificially buffed several times over and the challenges involving the cursed chests—where you can earn a reward if you can win the accompanying battle royale—might involve a timer that becomes absurdly punitive when every enemy's far sturdier then they ought to be. I'm inclined to review games holistically and that includes things like side-content, achievement sets, or higher difficulty levels so it brings me no joy to point out that the cracks really start to show there if you're looking to sweep up another platinum trophy or equivalent. If you're a normal person though, hey, you should be just fine getting through them; the part about them getting old after a while still sadly applies however.

A visual representation of how it feels to finally get a grasp of the game's Master Spirit Guide difficulty. Not a gentle curve whatsoever.

Overall though, Kena: Bridge of Spirits has an incredible style and a more old-fashioned open-world action-adventure format that you might find you've been missing with how much this model has been depreciated since we've entered the 2020s. The various "rot" creatures you can find and recruit, all very handy in fights as well, are adorable and offer something akin to a Pikmin game by way of a Ghibli movie—you can even play with them and dress them up with hatwear (bought using an alternative currency so that it doesn't interfere with the points put towards character development), suggesting the game knew precisely what it was doing by pushing their cuddly little hides to the forefront. The studio evidently has no issue delivering attractive CGI visuals given its history and while the game parts do often feel compromised by it being a freshman effort—the combat more so than the exploration—I'm not going to argue that it isn't perfectly adequate, only really starting to irk on the higher difficulties where the level of perfection demanded from the player can't quite be reflected by the game itself.

[One last thing to mention here is this boss fight video I recorded that takes place about halfway through the game (so, very mild spoilers). It ably demonstrates how defensive you have to play on the highest difficulty setting, given even the little "shove" shockwave caused by the boss leaping away after recovering from her stun state took out damn near half of my significantly upgraded health bar. Like Tunic, Kena is a game that can really hide some sharp claws behind its fluffy veneer.]

Rating: 4 out of 5.

<- Back to 451: Laika: Aged Through Blood