Kena: Bridge of Spirits (PS5)

Animation in the video game space is a difficult and multi-faceted process. Not only do games contain much more content than a film, but it can be viewed from different angles, triggered in different ways, and needs to be constantly reactive and incredibly flexible to create a persistent illusion of life. For this reason there are many allowances given by players to a game, moments where we accept a flat shot of characters delivering dialogue with barely any expression since then the animation effort can then go toward making the key moments more extravagant and visually sound. Kena: Bridge of Spirits does have different tiers of animation quality and complexity still, but what makes it stand out is that not only are the special cutscenes rendered with gorgeous attention to small detail, even the basic interactions in this world are still given a degree of care that makes an already consistently beautiful game feel more fluid and polished.

 

In Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Kena is a spirit guide whose purpose is to help troubled spirits pass over to the afterlife. While searching for a mountain shrine for a specific personal purpose, Kena comes across a corrupted village whose dark taint has prevented every villager who resides there from moving on. The path to the mountain shrine is blocked by the village’s dark energy, so Kena begins to search for the reason why the land was corrupted by the strange and malicious force that saps life from the very land and manifests as dark red and black vegetation. The path to the truth lies with a few of the lingering spirits who are more than simple echos of their former selves, Kena finding people with strong emotional connections that both allow them to take shape and speak with her but have caused others to be corrupted into monstrous forms.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an action adventure that usually moves at a pretty easy pace, the game having moments of free form puzzle solving before battles ask for more reactive movement and dodging that takes the game a bit away from its otherwise relaxed design. This doesn’t hurt the progress through the game, but the game’s environments can reflect this quite well. When passing through an area free of any evil taint you’ll find beautiful and abundant foliage with careful attention given to the placement of vegetation, stones, and the man-made structures built in a broad East Asian style while also having clear connection to a natural way of life. These lush and vividly detailed spaces serve practical purposes in housing extras to find or providing brief platforming and puzzle challenges, but its when the life is sapped from them by the dark power hanging over the land that you know you’re entering dangerous turf. Glum areas with their black withered look broken by the harsh red of the plants infesting the area are where danger lies, but defeating the enemies in that area will bring life back to the space, and in the wider areas with multiple goals, the recession of a land’s corruption gives you the visual reward of a beautiful landscape unfolding before your eyes.

 

More impressive though is how the character animations are handled. Rather than going for photorealism, Kena: Bridge of Spirits smooths out certain features deliberately without losing the small details and gives characters exaggerated features for more readable expressions. In the cutscenes where the level of attention and detail is at its highest you can see that even the small movements of strands of hair are given deliberate attention, but the range of expressions while talking is the more impressive part as they are not just relegated to these key moments. When talking to a spirit during regular exploration you can see them not only having a perfect lip sync with their lines but their expression is changing based on what they’re saying or seeing, and even if you are manually skipping through what they’re saying they aren’t adjusting in a jittery manner to keep up. The first two lingering spirits you spend a considerable time getting to know are a pair of children whose cherubic appearance and unguarded emotions makes this first portion of the game easy to get emotionally invested in, and while the game has three major spirit guiding chapters to its action, this first one definitely feels the most effective simply because it’s easy to see the life in the pair both during the scenes focusing on them and when they’re just moving about the world finding things to do. All three substories of the grander plot about aiding the village do have their small tragedies and nice animation touches to make their unfolding stories more emotionally effective despite not having the writing to really make them deeply impactful, but the attention to detail also benefits a set of small characters who prove important to the entire adventure: the Rot spirits.

 

Rot Spirits are tiny little black humanoids that don’t even reach Kena’s knee, their huge eyes and expressive faces easily making them adorable even though initial impressions may make them seem plain or a little saccharine. Rot will constantly interact with Kena and the world, a growing posse of them following behind her most of the time and finding little places in the environment to linger and play while you explore the space. An abundance of blue gems found around the world goes primarily to buying little hats for this growing band of followers and the game even allows you to just sit down and do a few small interactions with them if you like like letting once dance on your head or getting a little peck on the cheek from the smallest of the Rot. Finding additional Rot is how you level up Kena so she can gain new abilities that assist in combat and the Rot themselves help with your adventure in a wide variety of ways both in battle and solving environmental puzzles. At their simplest they’ll do things like group up to carry objects around but they are also key to clearing away the tainted plants that have taken over the village and surrounding areas. They must be deployed to weaken spheres of the corruption enough for your magic staff’s purifying power to break them, but the Rot can also assist in battle by distracting foes by flying about them in a swarm or even forming up with your weapon to make special attack types like a Rot hammer.

There are limits on how often the Rot can be deployed that often require you to go in and attack an enemy a fair bit before you have the power to use their special abilities, but for how much they can assist in a battle it is a reasonable limitation. Your staff is your main means of dealing quick damage although bosses and bigger enemies can take a considerable amount of punishment to even put a small dent in them. Usually there is some trick to dealing a huge chunk of damage to their health bar but these often can’t be used to completely defeat the tough foe, making working on careful Rot attacks more meaningful. Battles do get more complex on your end as you later earn a bow and bomb that can give you different ways to tackle such dangers, but the main fights with corrupted spirits definitely require a lot of quick dodging, persistent attacking, and some understanding of the few edges you can gain to eventually emerge victorious. A parry does exist although triggering it feels imprecise, the dodge more reliable at least so you aren’t left unequipped to handle the harder foes’ faster attacks. Only near the end of the game does it really feel like it asks for incredibly careful play to survive with most deaths in battle just putting you near to the battle to try again, the game able to make its fights often suitably challenging if sometimes going on a bit too long.

 

There are many small battles that can be pushed through quickly and a lot of time is still given to how you interact with the world rather than just keeping the focus on routine conflict. At various points you’ll be thrown into small but open spaces where you are free to find which tainted area or objective to complete first of the necessary ones, the game giving you a map hint for the important locations but still having a decent sense of discovery in regards to where you’re meant to go and where you can pursue extras. Hidden around the world are not only Rot Spirits and gems but meditation spots where you can increase your health, chests that either contain a good item or a combat challenge for an even rarer collectible, and Spirit Mail that can be delivered to houses back at the village to clear away the dark influence locking the spirits to them. Some of these are just about looking around thoroughly while others have small puzzles attached to them, although many of these aren’t all that deep. It can often be more about identifying something can be done than the actual difficulty in performing them, although needing to shoot down targets quickly enough with you bow can provide a small action challenge and the bombs also have an interesting time stop effect where arranging the debris that was blasted up into the air and frozen can prove to be a bit of an intriguing test.

 

The exploration is mostly quite rewarding and all of that vivid visual detail given to the world around you also pays off by helping you notice the little incongruities that can hint at a hidden treasure or even serve as part of some of the more clever puzzles on offer. One last major Rot Spirit use though is a rather finicky one. At points you can have the entire group fuse together into a reflection of what their fully combined self is meant to look like, this feline ghostly form always feeling a little bit awkward to use. It is a vital tool for clearing away certain types of taint and it can help in a fight the rare times it is available during them, but its method of control has you moving Kena with the left control stick and the Rot Spirit amalgam with the right one. You can’t really control the camera angle during this so sometimes there’s some shuffling about just to even see the area you’re trying to send them to and their built in timer before they break apart means that sometimes you won’t even get everything done with them you intend to and need to awkwardly wrangle this form again to continue your work. In other gameplay areas like using the bow you get nice allowances like time slowing down if you’re midjump when trying to line up a shot but the Rot amalgam’s basic controls are too awkward to ever really enjoy its moments of required use.

THE VERDICT: A lot of love and care was put into the look and animation of Kena: Bridge of Spirits and its pays off not only by giving its plainly written story a much-needed emotional boost but it also impacts the way you interact with its world. Its environments invite your attention and reward you for noticing little areas of interest and the adorable Rot are both helpful allies and cute little critters to see moving about in unique and specially crafted ways. Battles can sometimes be a little rough in how demanding they can be while puzzles can be a little simple at times, but for the most part it is a pleasure to explore the vividly realized world to find those more abundant moments where your small but useful set of skills gels with creative puzzles or challenging battles.

 

And so, I give Kena: Bridge of Spirits for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. Kena: Bridge of Spirits isn’t a totally congruous whole, but its attention to both important details and excellent little touches means its offerings are much better than its little discrepancies. It is at times a game that feels a good fit for someone looking for a vivid little world to explore with many small but involved puzzles to engage with, the simplicity of a fair bit of them not too bad if you’re just going from one to the next as you travel across the somewhat open areas. Then the combat would kick in and demand a different set of skills though and at its most difficult it feels like it’s expecting a more proficient player than the kind that might enjoy calmly engaging in small navigational challenges. Neither area is done poorly even if things like the Rot amalgam could have done with better controls and it is nice to see how much the Rot do intersect with your actions no matter which half of the game you’re engaging with at the time. Rather than some cheap ploy to earn easy affection with their designs, they are useful assistants while Kena and her own powers are just as important to overcoming much of what lies in her path, a good degree of cohesion afforded to the experience due to the fact you use the same things both for fighting and puzzle solving. The storytelling receives a great boon from all of the craft put into realizing its pivotal scenes and making the characters feel more alive, although the game sometimes reveals a bit too much about a situation outright so that the continued developments feel less like learning more about a specific spirit’s strife and more like adding in details that were already easy to assume from the introduction to that segment of the game. It has some lingering mysteries and it is still easy to feel the twinges of emotion the game is aiming for with the tragic tails tied to the tainted village, but a more gradual growth of the narratives with some less than obvious directions could have made them more interesting than the still impressive way they’re visually conveyed.

 

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is more than just its beautiful environments, lovely music, and a consistent degree of attention to animation and expression, although that extra level of care definitely benefits it greatly. The activities before you do continue to evolve and ask for different approaches as your skills expand, but taking the time to breathe in the atmosphere helps to cool you down after a rough fight or easily glide from optional collectible to required puzzle. Its art design is the more meticulously realized and cohesive part of it, but it is still aligned with a good action game with a few nifty mechanics that get a good degree of mileage.