Kena: Bridge of Spirits seemed like a surefire winner to me. A critically praised, beautiful and gentle-looking game with a linear action-adventure structure is exactly the sort of game that I tend to vibe with. With a protagonist whose staff looks like she borrowed it from Star Fox Adventures and whose plucky attitude is reminiscent of Link from the Zelda series it promised to be lighthearted, breezy, and full of fun little secrets to find and mystical lands to explore.

And it sort of is, but with so many caveats that at the end of the day I don’t think I like this game very much. I want to like it, and I kind of like parts of it, but on the whole I’d say this is a game I’d have been better off giving a miss to, which still surprises me.

Kena starts quite promisingly. It’s a beautiful game with some really nice animation and that’s obvious right off the bat. You play as the eponymous Kena and you begin your adventure in a dank cave, going through a short tutorial section that showcases Kena’s lovely animation and the character’s highly expressive face and eyes. Then you make it up to the surface and enter a lush and verdant world that’s infected by some kind of corruption. Over the first hour or so the game reveals its basic set up. Kena is a spirit guide who helps the lingering spirits of the dead find their way on to the next world. Some kind of corruption has fallen over the land and is trapping spirits in the world and preventing them from crossing over, which further increases the corruption, so Kena must cleanse the corruption to complete her role in easing the transition of the spirits. She does this with the help of “the rot” which are cute little black blobs with faces that Kena gathers during her travels and can utilize in various ways. After building rot charges up during combat she can send them to distract enemies, use them to recharge her health (which also recharges automatically when she is out of combat) with the help of flowers, and charge up her ranged attacks with bow and bomb with them. The rot are also necessary to purge the corruption, where they swirl around the blooms of corruption so that Kena can destroy those blooms and cleanse the area. Kena can collect dozens of these little rot creatures, which form a Pikmin like cloud around her and can be individually equipped with silly hats, and most of the collectables in the game take the form of these little rot creatures or currency to buy hats with.

The obstacles Kena faces on her journey will be familiar to any gamer. The corruption enemies take on familiar forms, like owls, slugs, humanoid creatures of various types and toughnesses, and the like. She will also have to do a fair amount of 3D platforming to get up to locations where she can move forward or get close enough to some corruption to clear it. This involves basic double jumping and dashing but also a Legend of Zelda style slow time archery aiming system where Kena shoots blooms to be pulled towards them like a hook shot. All of this is pretty straightforward and unobjectionable but not super engaging. Combat involves a simple system of weak and strong strikes, though busting out a full combo will almost always result in taking hits because you are often swarmed by enemies and of course your strikes don’t do enough stagger. Kena also has a bow ability with recharging arrows and gains the ability to throw bombs. Arrows and bombs can be charged with rot to do more damage and, in the case of bombs, create a bubble of slowed time that opens enemies up to attack. These rot charged bombs are among the most effective means Kena has of dealing with difficult foes and quickly become a necessity in the later game.

Kena will also deal with some basic puzzles. These are often timed affairs where you must complete some series of actions like using bombs to blast rock formations into temporary platforms before they return to their normal shape, or a series of flower jumps to navigate to a higher location. These puzzles can be slightly irritating due to tight time constraints and a few unintuitive bits (I had to look up the solution to one that involves hitting a series of targets in an order that’s only shown by the relative position of some apparently decorative candles, with no real feedback as to whether you have a partial solution) but they’re mostly fine for what they are. They won’t challenge the Uncharted series for inventiveness or spectacle, but nobody expects that from a budget indie release.

Finally there are the various chests and other collectables in Kena. Most of the time these just contain cosmetic Rot hats or currency but you can also find meditation spots to increase your health and additional little rot dudes to join your horde, eventually enabling you to hold more charges at once. After a while the fun of the hats wears off and you start getting annoyed when you solve a tightly timed puzzle only to get more meaningless cosmetic cruft, but most of the time it’s moderately fun to explore and find things in the game’s mostly empty but cosmetically appealing environments. The gentle power curve with relatively few upgrades and some new abilities doled out at story points is well designed for the most part, though letting you power up even further might have blunted some of the difficulty spikes that ruined the game for me.

As for Kena’s story, it’s…sparse but fine? Most of the time you’ll be learning about the past of the trapped spirits, what their lives were like and how they died, but there’s also an overarching plot about the fall of a village you’re exploring and even Kena’s own history, focusing on the loss of her father whose staff she carries. Some of the individual stories are emotionally affecting but for the most part it’s standard and predictable, with telegraphed twists and cliched lessons. There’s nothing objectionable to it and it’s probably above average for an indie title, but much of its appeal comes from how restrained it is. This is not a story focused game and it’s not trying to be; there’s just enough to get you to connect with the characters (mostly Kena herself) and have a reason to do the things you do.

So far I’ve described a game that may not be anything special but sounds like a pleasant enough time rehashing old action adventure themes we’ve all played and enjoyed. Maybe not a home run, but a fun and familiar time for someone who remembers the 6^th generation fondly and likes linear action games. And that is how I would describe Kena if it were not for two major issues, which compound one another. The first is the Dark Souls inspired bosses, and the second is the absolutely disgusting camera, which is game ruiningly bad.

Kena looks like a game that should have a gentle and forgiving difficulty curve, what with its soft organic graphics and expressive anime protagonist. For the most part it is that game. Then you get to the bosses and it’s Dark Souls. Bosses in Kena start out manageable but quickly become quite brutal, with multiple phases and devastating attacks. These are savage, draining, battles and being shoved back to the start of one after getting a glimpse of a third phase but being absolutely destroyed by unfamiliar patterns is frustrating and annoying. Obviously you don’t have the punishing mechanics of Dark Souls, but you do have tight parry windows, lots of obnoxious adds of monsters, limited health regen opportunities, and all the feints and unblockable attacks we’ve had to get used to over the last decade or so. Some of Kena’s interstitial battles can be taxing, but nothing compared to these boss encounters, which are long, annoying, and play to the game’s worst flaws, chiefly that #$!*ing camera.

What’s wrong with Kena’s camera? A thousand little things. At first it seems like a fairly typical third person action camera, mostly behind the back and a little closer in than you might like but serviceable. Oh. If only. Kena’s camera on its default settings is one of the worst antagonists in gaming. It is designed with “assists,” and I use that term with bitter irony, to point the camera towards enemies the game believes you are attacking or who are attacking you. What this means in practice is that when you are lining up attacks or jumps or whatever the camera will periodically jerk towards some random enemy in the environment and away from your target. Often you will be focusing on the biggest threat on the playfield and either preparing to time a parry or trying to aim at one of their tiny pinpoint weak spots for a bow shot (you can zoom in to aim with the bow but this gives you zero peripheral vision so you are better off lining up your shots with the normal camera and then slowing time to fine tune, at least on PS5) and suddenly, as if there’s a malicious little two year old grabbing at your analog sticks, the camera will jerk towards some other minor threat that you were aware of but not targeting at the moment.

It's an awful system. Truly terrible. Whoever designed it should just stop making games and go into some other line of work because they are a menace to any team they are on. The lead designers who allowed this system into their game should also quit the industry and go join a monastery somewhere to atone for their sins. It feels like a prank. It took me a long time to figure out exactly why things felt off because I couldn’t conceive of a system this badly thought through or implemented. How did this get through playtesting? It isn’t helpful in reading enemy attacks or identifying threats, it’s just maddening and takes camera control away from the player to hand it over to the whims of some CPU god that has no idea what you’re trying to accomplish or what you’re looking at.

In the game’s defense once you realize what the problem is you can turn this stuff off in the options menu, which does make it more playable (again, this system is impossibly bad and made me legitimately and personally angry at the fiends who programmed it) but that only helps things to a degree. Kena is desperately in need of a Ocarina of Time style z targeting lock on system to help you keep track of enemies, who you often have to dash or dodge around, taking them from your field of view. Fortunately it has such a system, though it’s never tutorialized. It’s the L3 button and it even shows you what enemy you’re aiming at, but it has the unfortunate effect of making it even harder to see other threats. Kena is just too fast paced a game with too many enemies for its restricted field of view, and its tight parry windows and limited block energy, along with its anemic standard dodge roll, make it really hard to avoid taking hits. Meanwhile the slow recharge on your arrows makes engaging from a distance tedious and time consuming, and the fact that enemies can retarget their attacks up until the last minute leaves you with very short dodge windows and lots of times where you’ll read an attack but get hit because the enemy wasn’t committed yet and was able to turn mid charge to correct for your dodge and smash you in the face. These tight windows mean that keeping everything in view is essential to survival, but the bad camera systems make it impossible.

All this comes to a head in those boss battles. Many bosses have abilities that allow them to do things like teleport behind you, dash through the sky to get behind you, or rain down a bunch of exploding fireballs that create radiating circles you need to jump over. All of those things require a good camera system so you can see where the boss is and what they’re doing to prepare to defend yourself. Good luck, bucko! The signature experience in Kena is being hit by an attack that came from off screen and seeing a third of your life bar vanish. You are constantly having to guestimate where projectiles are coming from and dashing in basically random directions because you don’t know where the attack is coming from but you know standing still isn’t an option. It’s frantic, frustrating, and rage inducing. The second to last boss is the worst for this, but many of the bosses share these issues.

I have other issues with Kena including some technical problems. I almost abandoned the game after it crashed when I beat the second main area boss after dozens of teeth gnashing tries, forcing me to start again from square one. I was able to beat it after a couple more tries because I’d learned its patterns, but I felt no satisfaction, only relief that I would never have to face it again. That was generally true of most of Kena’s bosses. I would fight them for a while, get mad, then beat them and feel a flood of relief that I didn’t have to do that anymore. Then there was another hour of anodyne and mostly pleasant gameplay before another boss encounter, which range from mildly engaging to infuriating.

Kena is a game I only beat out of spite. I wanted to be able to rant about it without people saying “git gud” or thinking I was bitter because I couldn’t get through it. Now I’ve gotten through it, and I’m still bitter. I took about a month off between getting to the second to last boss and sitting down to force myself to finish the game, and during that time I lost any connection to the threadbare plot and characters and any interest in learning more about or exploring the world. Now on the other side and knowing I will never be frustrated by the game again I’m tempted to go easier on it because of all the reasons I thought I’d like it in the first place (beautiful graphics, lovely music, appealing genre and structure) but I’d rather be true to my experience. A beautiful soundtrack is great, but it can’t make up from a camera that has crawled straight out of hell, or a difficulty curve that’s totally out of sync with the aesthetics and story themes. Sometimes game difficulty can inhibit enjoyment of the other aspects a game has going for it and Kena perfectly hits that sour spot where it’s so frustrating that it hurts enjoyment of everything else, from story to aesthetics.

I know there are some people out there who truly love this game and I can sort of understand why. If you’re in to masochistic games and long boss fights then it might not bother you so much. Heck, just figuring out what’s wrong with the camera and turning the assists off earlier in the game would help a lot. The game has a beautiful aesthetic, good music, a pleasant enough story, etc… Buried beneath the camera issues and Dark Souls influence is the pleasant action adventure game I wanted when I bought it. But I didn’t have a good time with Kena and I have to be honest about it. There are a lot of good things about this game and a lot of talented people clearly worked on it (it’s very impressive how well it stands up graphically considering its tiny development team) but just because a bunch of talented chefs spent hours perfectly cooking your soup doesn’t make you want to eat it when you find a bunch of flies floating on the surface.