Kena: Bridge of Spirits

Whilst this game is visually gorgeous, and the sound design is often comparable, I found the gameplay itself to be generic and tedious, and almost everything the game asks the player to do unengaging. It is a tremendously cookie cutter sort of a game that excessively holds your hand, over-explains, offers the player little to no agency while guiding them through a thoroughly on-rails sequence of events, and discourages you from actively exploring and participating in the world in favour of following map and quest markers Combat becomes incredibly repetitive incredibly quickly, spamming the same melee attacks over and over, whilst being swarmed with largely the same mobs over and over. Bosses tend to be relatively readily learned as far as their movesets go, but take entirely too long to die; by the time you've finally killed them you're thoroughly disengaged from the entire process. Several of the bosses I encountered in my 3-4 hours before quitting made a habit of (i) frequently entering immune phases wherein they can't be damaged, and (ii) repeatedly summoning waves of adds, making their time-to-kill only weakly related to player skill. The whole Rot mechanic rapidly becomes tired as well, as it amounts to little more than identifying that a Rot interaction prompt has popped up on the screen, and then obediently following the game's instructions to first press one button and then press another. It's just mindless busywork. Not satisfying or engaging The game’s exploration is even worse. Most of the attractive world is inaccessible scenery, while traversable routes are tightly prescribed using white paint, interaction prompts and objective markers. Rather than teaching the player the geography through distinctive landmarks, intelligible paths and diegetic directions, Kena constructs maze-like, visually homogeneous spaces and then compensates with a magical map that simply tells the player where to go. Consequently, I never learned or inhabited this world; I merely opened the interface, followed the enormous marker and fast-travelled as close to it as possible. The story follows the same artificial structure. You're given an objective and a corresponding map marker. You reach the marker, some meaningless dialogue proceeds, and then suddenly another objective materializes out of nowhere, and then another marker appears on your map. Rinse and repeat. For example, this one time Kena experiences some sort of vision of a spirit in obvious distress, and then immediately upon cessation of said vision informs the 2 NPCs she's with that we must find "three relics". Excuse me, what? Nothing about what I just witnessed communicated the necessity of these "three relics". What even are relics in this case? It's weird because another NPC suddenly starts referring to the relics as well. The game could at least have gone to the bother of establishing that spirit guides, in performing this kind of work, might in some instances need to gather a collection of objects that were personally meaningful to the spirit in question in order to ease his or her mind and allow the spirit to pass on peacefully. But nah, it's just suddenly, "find relics"... Also, minor aside, this will work for some people and not others; but Kena, along with one or two other characters have a decided tendency to repeatedly talk in this breath-y ASMR style. Personally I found it to be a cheap affectation, and at some points it got on my nerves. Ultimately, all Kena has going for it is that it looks wonderful and occasionally sounds wonderful. As a game, it is safe, artificial, repetitive and profoundly unengaging.