Review: Kena: Bridge of Spirits Is a Gorgeous Breath of Recycled Ideas

For better and worse, the game lacks for the trailblazing go-anywhere spirit of Breath of the Wild.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits
Photo: Ember Lab

Conceptually, Kena: Bridge of Spirits is as clear as the souls that Kena aids over the course of the game. As a spirit guide, her job is to literally bridge the gap between worlds, helping spirits to cross over. In doing so, she acquires new powers that allow her to build a path forward through the ruins of a once-bustling village: a bow with arrows that can warp Kena to distant targets, a bomb that temporarily restores broken objects to their original state, and a dash that allows her to briefly snap between realms.

Ember Lab’s Bridge of Spirits bears more than a passing resemblance to a 3D Legend of Zelda adventure, only with a bit more immediacy and purpose to the tools that Kena collects. This is particularly apparent in the way that the three key-like relics required to unlock the gate to each boss represent (and provide the backstory to) the love, fear, and regret that have prevented the game’s corrupted souls from passing on into the afterlife.

When Bridge of Spirits focuses the player on tasks pertaining to these relics and the emotions they’re bound to—restoring the power to a storehouse, avoiding the trip-wires along the Hunter’s Path, braving the monsters of the Lantern Cave—the game proceeds as an elegant series of puzzles and combat, where success is dependent on smoothly weaving together separate skills. But in the semi-open hubs of the village and its surrounding fields, forests, and mountain, the game doesn’t exactly come alive due to the sense of freedom that’s handed to the player. Kena can solve generic environmental puzzles and uncover optional challenges, but these tasks are disconnected from the plot and do nothing to help restore the land.

Advertisement

The promise of the game’s map, sumptuously inked in the sumi-e style, isn’t exactly kept by the world itself, which abounds in details inspired by Japanese and South East Asian cultures. The problem here is that these details don’t feel particularly lived in; they’re just window dressing in between the combat and platforming. For one, using “karma” points to upgrade your skills and boosting your maximum HP by finding meditation spots feels random at best, given that there isn’t an explicitly religious component to Bridge of Spirits.

YouTube video

The game’s regions are also hard to navigate, such as in areas like the so-called God Tree that have a bit of verticality to them. Figuring out what Bridge of Spirits wants you to do is frustrating, especially when it looks as if certain jumps can be made and barriers can be destroyed. This sort of bad signposting can make it hard to notice the intended visual signs, like a shining crystal high off in a tree or the white chalk outline of a ledge you can cling to, that signal the real route forward. These subtle cues are missable, and worsened by occasional mechanical glitches that, for example, get Kena stuck in a jumping animation or locked on a menu screen, so that it’s unclear whether you’re doing something wrong or the game is.

That’s why the game’s combat works so well: its clarity of purpose. For one, you don’t have to hunt out paths or figure out how to reach them. The enemies come to you, and as you dispatch them with gymnastic delight, you’ll find yourself flowing gracefully between foes. And the more flawlessly you do so, the more courage you generate, which allows you to call upon cute little forest creatures known as Rot, who will assist you by distracting foes or amplifying your abilities. A typical encounter might require you to break a foe’s shield with a heavy staff attack and then to quickly parry a mage’s blast back into their face before spirit dashing into an ethereal foe, thereby returning them to the physical plane. Each new ability—a gravity-altering bomb, a spirit-grappling bow and arrow—adds to the variety of these encounters.

Advertisement

Bridge of Spirits is an old-fashioned adventure game, one that sets you on a very curated, puzzle-marked path. Which is to say that it lacks for the trailblazing go-anywhere spirit of Breath of the Wild. But Kena is, after all, a spirit guide, so you can trust that you’re not missing out on much by sticking to the missions that she calls out on the map. What you’ll get by following that path that she puts you on are the tightest, most compelling pieces of gameplay, those rooted in plot. In fact, seeing as what happens to those spirits who lose themselves along the way, the purest form of Bridge of Spirits is the one that doesn’t wander off.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by Ember Lab.

Score: 
 Developer: Ember Lab  Publisher: Ember Lab  Platform: PlayStation 5  Release Date: September 21, 2021  ESRB: E10+  ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.