Status DucksOnQuack Sep 22, 2021
Played 5 hours of Kena on PC. i9-9900K, RTX 3070, 16 GB of DDR4 at 3.6 GHZ.
It's good. I wasn't too blown away at first. It starts off really easy, even in hard difficulty, but it does enough to make the player utilize a lot of their toolkit after the 2nd hour, which is where the game tends to …
Played 5 hours of Kena on PC. i9-9900K, RTX 3070, 16 GB of DDR4 at 3.6 GHZ.
It's good. I wasn't too blown away at first. It starts off really easy, even in hard difficulty, but it does enough to make the player utilize a lot of their toolkit after the 2nd hour, which is where the game tends to pick up in difficulty. I really liked how minibosses subvert mechanics to push you into using other strategies. An example would be one that teleports to certain spots. You can't attack fast enough so you're pushed to use the rot to stun them so that you can close in on them. Then another miniboss has these weakpoints that you shoot. Ok, so it's best to stun them right? No. Even if you use the rot against them, they will still attack so you are incentivized to use the bow against the weakpoints. You have some decision making like with rot moves to either stun enemies, heal yourself, or to use some special attacks.
Graphics are really pretty and Ember Lab transitioned really well from an animation studio to a game development studio. The game in action still maintains that sort of art style expected from Ember Lab with how detailed the masks were just like in their Majora's Mask animation. Surprisingly for a debut game that is this demanding, I'm really surprised at how technically sound it is. This is a greatly optimized game with very little frame hitches.
So far, good on Ember Lab. They have an even wider portfolio with animation and video games and I could see them becoming even bigger.
