Capcom is totally dialled in proper now; every part it touches appears to show to gold, from main releases to smaller experiments. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess definitely matches into the latter class, and it is a terrific time for followers of real-time technique with a twist.
With the ability to management a hero character in amongst the frenzy of a battle you are dictating may not be utterly new, nevertheless it’s given a contemporary feeling by that battle being very a lot tower defence-inflected. Over the course of a ten to 12-hour playtime, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a delight, albeit with a few tough edges. Actually, you may find yourself wishing it have been just a bit longer.
The sport’s story is advised virtually fully with out dialogue. It opens with the participant character, Soh, trying to stave off an invasion of demons referred to as Seethe from the highest of his mountain house, defending the native shrine maiden Yoshiro as she performs rites to banish them. They’re overcome, although, and the mountain is overrun; the sport is actually a procession down its slopes, in retreat however cleaning the land as they go.
This manifests in a mission-based construction — as you wind your means down a marketing campaign map you may cease at shrines, deserted villages, and tunnels to cease off and tackle each’s problem. As soon as you’ve got accomplished a location, you are tasked with allocating assets to restore it over time, a easy and finally barely tedious little bit of base-building that yields improve assets and unlockables. Diving into these missions, although, is the actual meat of the sport.
Kunitsu-Gami places you in Soh’s footwear in a sequence of arenas as he guides Yoshiro down a set monitor to a gate she should purify. Often you may select between two branching paths, however both means, you may nonetheless be going through the identical activity. You will have a daytime interval by which to run across the stage, discovering patches of demonic vitality to purify your self, incomes factors that may then be spent on the villagers you discover and free across the place, changing them into martial models.
At first, these will likely be restricted to easy archers and axemen, however earlier than lengthy you may unlock extra expensive choices which have the facility to, for instance, freeze enemies in place briefly, shoot explosive cannonballs from a distance, and even heal their fellow models. You will place these round Yoshiro’s ultimate place because the day falls into night time, at which level the fight will begin, requiring you to outlive till morning.
This implies the arrival of enemies from set places: festering gates that spill demons out and see them tramp in direction of the maiden, slowed by your models, any obstacles you’ve got managed to assemble, and your personal abilities. Soh is a swordsman, in spite of everything, and you’ll sweep by fields of foes extra devastatingly than the models you order round. Which means every night time divides your consideration in two — the place you have to be, preventing hearth and slicing demons down, and the place your models ought to be, offering protecting hearth or blockading a lane fully.
It is a actually enjoyable steadiness, with a traditional rock-paper-scissors component to your selection of models primarily based on the enemies arriving, and additional twists are thrown in pretty repeatedly (every used at the least a few occasions) to make issues more difficult. There are levels the place you are not ready to participate in fight your self, and may solely present orders; others see you on a floating armada of boats, struggling to cease any of the crafts from being sunk; one other kind requires you to maintain lanterns lit across the stage to have the ability to goal enemies.
Your skill to truly give instructions comes by a time-pausing menu that permits you to cycle by your models and place them across the map, though you are restricted by your area of view and site; there is not any easy means to go searching the entire map whereas paused. You additionally must be proper subsequent to a unit to heal it or change its function (which you may must do typically in later levels), so put together for Soh’s comparatively sluggish motion pace to turn into a bit of annoying.
Soh’s precise fight controls are serviceable however noticeably nowhere close to as clean as a superb Dynasty Warriors character, not to mention a Dante or Bayonetta. This arguably helps to steadiness your energy on the battlefield, nevertheless it makes investing in Soh’s skill-tree lack attract in comparison with upgrading your models’ capabilities. That improve tree is absolutely refundable at any time, although, which is nice for experimenting with completely different models and techniques.
Most levels final for multiple night time, and sometimes a handful of days as you tempo your self by maps, stopping on the proper second to get a buff for the night time and affording your self extra time to construct enhancements, like cannons or sharpshooting towers. Managing your models by these repeated engagements is difficult enjoyable, backed up by beneficiant nightly checkpointing which implies you may hardly ever, if ever, must restart an entire mission from scratch when you fail.
Nonetheless, it is truthful to say that, by the point credit rolled, we have been nonetheless on the lookout for a really gruelling stage — the chance to actually rating a backs-against-the-wall victory in opposition to the percentages. These delay by excessive problem could be reassured that Kunitsu-Gami is extra approachable than you may suppose. What do typically demand extra ability are the boss fights that you simply unlock between most levels. These act as necessary boundaries to your progress, some introducing new, extra highly effective foes, whereas others are a bit of extra distinctive (and admittedly, typically tiresome to truly struggle).
From a top-down perspective however with a variety of digital camera management, the sport seems fairly beautiful at occasions, though it is a bit of low on environmental element. These demon fashions are ravishingly bizarre, to make up for it, and we did not have any efficiency points whereas enjoying. Kunitsu-Gami’s soundtrack deserves point out, too, a stunning mix of clean and calm melodies with funky prog-rock in its most heated moments. Additionally on the sound entrance, you may wish to flip down your DualSense controller’s speaker within the PS5’s system settings, as the sport sadly makes pretty obnoxiously fixed use of it with no toggle to show it off.
Conclusion
It may not really feel fairly as new as its billing, however Kunitsu-Gami remains to be a stunning little sport, with a critically engrossing hook that’ll have you ever wishing it was longer than it really is. The plates it retains spinning are spectacular, even when it is really a bit of slight within the ultimate weighing.
