If I start by saying Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a hard game, I’ll get 50 people telling me some other game is harder. Kena is not Dark Souls, nor is it trying to be, but I found the combat to be a lot more challenging than I expected. Call me a noob, but there were a few encounters I really struggled with, particularly early on, and especially on higher difficulties. I haven’t played a game this difficult since last year’s Mortal Shell, or maybe Kingdom Hearts 3 Re Mind. If you thought Kena was going to be too simplistic for your hardcore gamer skills, maybe it’s worth giving it another look.
I’ll admit that I judged the book by its cover here. Kena has a beautiful aesthetic and perhaps the best animation I’ve ever seen in a game, so it caught me off guard when the first boss smashed my head in. If a game doesn’t have Gothic castles, rivers of hellfire, or demons with six arms, I guess I just assume they’re going to be a cakewalk. Kena teaches you early on that you have to be on your A-game or you’re going to get smacked around.
Timing your blocks and dodges can be tricky until you get a feel for the rhythm of the different enemy types in Kena, but the only thing that consistently caught me off guard was the ranged attacks. There are multiple enemies that can charge you from across the arena, and their attacks are incredibly magnetic. If you don’t time your dodge perfectly, they’ll curve their attack to hit you. The window for dodging is often only a few frames, so getting that timing right - even when I knew what to do - was a consistent challenge for me throughout the entire game.
Part of the challenge at the beginning is simply the lack of tools. Until you unlock the bow for ranged attacks, the bomb for stuns, and the dash for quickly escaping, you’re extremely limited by your abilities. Even the shield needs to be upgraded twice before it can withstand heavy attacks, and until then, blocking will still cause you to take damage and can even leave you stunned and open for a follow-up attack. Your health pool is incredibly low for the first few hours, and on the normal difficulty, you can be killed with only two or three hits. It’s not quite the trial by fire that something like Bloodborne hits you with right at the start, but Kena’s combat is still fairly demanding.
Combat gets a lot better once you get the bow upgrade, but it becomes legitimately good once you unlock the bomb and its associated Rot perk. By building up courage and infusing the bomb with Rot energy, you can create a field that temporarily freezes enemies inside of it. This allows you to get in close to deal lots of damage, target weak points with your bow while they’re frozen, or ignore them to focus on clearing the arena of small enemies. It’s a powerful tool that requires timing to use successfully, as well as a good sense of resource management given how limited courage is.
The last boss is a remarkable test of everything you’ve learned throughout the game. When it starts, you’re stripped of all your Rot abilities and tasked with fighting through multiple arenas full of enemies without healing or using your super attacks. It feels like you’re back at the start of the game, forced to rely on your fundamentals. When you earn your abilities back later in the fight, the instant power boost feels amazing. The fight has six stages, including a platforming section, and if you die at any point you have to start the entire gauntlet over from the beginning. It’s a great throwback to the kind of multi-form boss fights we don’t see much of anymore, and though I got pretty frustrated after a few failed attempts, the satisfaction from beating it felt incredible.
I don’t go out of my way to play a lot of hard games these days, but Kena reminded me of those long summer nights grinding Ninja Gaiden Black and Devil May Cry 3, fighting the same bosses over and over until I finally beat them by the skin of my teeth. I’ve come to appreciate Kena for the way it reminds me of so many other games, and even if it isn’t technically a “hard game”, the combat definitely has enough hard game DNA to satisfy even the sweatiest gamers.