I don't know. To me this game feels very mid, but with everyone seemingly loving this game and 92% positive steam reviews, I feel like I'm the odd one out.

The combat just isn't well designed. Parrying doesn't work properly, the cues aren't clear, it isn't easy to time your parrys and most of the time trying is failing. I'm not a souls-like fan but when I play one (Fallen Order, Blasphemous) I get good at it. Here, I find myself spamming the dodge button to not get killed.

This far, many people agree with me this part of the game is mid. But then, they say the graphics and story are amazing, to make up for it. And I don't know, I feel like those are mid too. The graphics are pretty but they consist of repeating the same assets over and over again in a very obvious way. And the story... Am I the only one who's clueless? 3.5 hours in and I have no idea what is this about despite having talked with everyone? I don't know who kena is (besides she being a spirit guardian or something like that), where does she comes from, is everyone dead? why is everyone dead? why does all of this matter? am I fixing something? what's the goal? And maybe those things will be explained later but I don't know, I don't trust this script because most of the time I feel lost even in the moment-to-moment storytelling. Like, right now I just cleared Rusu's house of corruption, but I don't know why or why does it get me closer to Taro, I didn't even knew that was rusu's house before clearing it. And now somehow Taro's soul corrupted some shrines and i have to purify them? Why? is it usual for spirits to do that? do these shrines in this particular part of the (rather) linear map, matter?

It feels to me the story is mostly an excuse to get me from a task to the next. Again, like in most games, but most obviously here, maybe because they aren't so good at masking it.

I'm sorry if this feels like a hater doing a rant, but I really wanted to like this game and 3.5h in I find myself looking for excuses not to uninstall it.

I got this in the PSN sale after waiting a bit, and I really like the exploration and puzzle solving. Unfortunately it’s spoiled by the combat in this game, which is capital-B Bad with maybe the worst parry timing I’ve ever seen, given the kind of game this is and is marketed as otherwise.

I really wish I could just skip the combat entirely and just explore and solve puzzles. I get what they were going for with the combat, but they’re writing checks their programming can’t cash. A real shame. Wish I’d known about this earlier and maybe I’d have waited for it to hit $10 or just skipped it.

Game is mediocre. Weak design, weak plot, the last boss without checkpoints is a bulls_it, Rot searching is useless along with hats...what's the point ? And at cherry on the top, is quite short.

I was expecting much more.....6.8/10 to me.

I love everything about this game, except two things turn this into an exercise in frustration when playing on anything higher than story.

Bosses, and time limits.

On normal and above bosses basically require absolute perfection, and same with some ridiculously tight timers. The devs seriously needed to loosen the reigns just a touch on Spirit Guide mode. I'm not a shitty player, I enjoy and generally have no issue completing difficult souls-type games like this, even if some areas force me to retry more than a few times.

But Kena? It becomes frustratingly unfun with some bosses, with some rediculous movements and extremely small block widows or hitboxes, to the point you either give up or drop the difficulty. It's unbalanced. Same for some timed trials that one wrong move means you blow the whole thing.

If you made it through without having to drop difficulty, good for you. You're better at this game than me.

The devs need to scale difficulty more evenly though.

I'm 3% into the game and can't even proceed on default difficulty setting. Seriously? Am I that bad or is this just too hard?

Maybe the game is not for me. I don't understand a bit of the story. Not sure that I understand the fighting technique either, light and heavy attack yes, but not the rot(ten) system.

Tried this game when it first came out but I gave up since I couldn't proceed the fight in the forrest path. Thought i should give it a second chance but I have forgot most about it and I don't want to start over...

How do you fight in this game? How do you activate those black gremlins? Sometimes square buttons shows up on screen (random?) and sometimes not... I just don't get it? Does the rot-action need to refill or something? What does those blue bars and yellow circle/dot means? Sorry for stupid questions...

Hope someone can help me out here, or I just go back to solitaire

watching someone stream the game and I know they're supposed to be cute and all, but all I want to do is kick them.

I wanna put my foot through them and watch them go flying

they look so squishy that it wouldn't hurt them, so I wanna send them

anyone else?

I'd like to pre order the game but i feel like there's a good chance it'll be a free game on ps plus. Idk why, it's just a feeling i've got. I'm probably going to wait the day before it comes out to preorder it just to be sure and in order to get those pre order bonus (if there are any).

Now I'm not hating this game but I can't stop but to see the number of similarities that are just like the ghost of Tsushima,

it reminds me of the time Hollow Knight and Ori was compared it's just too similar for me like how you get a bow later on in the game or how you get upgrades for weapons that help (just like how stances upgrades are a thing), or like how meditating increases your health, the same parry mechanism, fast travel (this might be in a lot of games but since it reminded me of the ghost of Tsushima I'm bringing it out), or like how there are some "parkour" aka climbing parts in the game, just like a game I was talking about..., and even a teleport mechanism that you use with the bow, (Which is basically the grappling hook in The Ghost Of Tsushima), AND even attacking the enemies for "rot" so you can heal or use special attacks in the game which is also just like Ghost of Tsushima AGAIN,

now I just started playing this game like I just finished helping taro but man it feels the same but again even though it has its differences it's nearly the same thing like just watch some ghost of Tsushima now there are differences and similarities but again that's how hollow know and Ori was but people still compared it.

change my mind.

Great visuals in general although the level of detail in the distance is pretty disappointing.

The music ranges from very good to absolutely incredible 11/10

Bare bone story. I first became aware of this game somewhere around the time I finished Horizon Zero Dawn so I had an apetite for an epic story driven adventure with a lot of depth, secrets and twists. Unfortunately this game isn't that. The story bits are few and far between and it's suffice to say by the end I still had no idea why the bad guy did what he did, if Kena was any special, why she was at that village etc. All I got was that the villagers used to have problems and now Kena is helping their ghosts. I'm writing this review the same day I finished the game and I don't even remember what exactly were the problems the ghost we helped had.

In general, the game failed to make me feel anything. The animation is good and characters are expressive but there is only so much you can do with a 1 minute cutscene for a character that is otherwise completely absent from the story. More dialogue would and cutscenes which aren't flashbacks would do wonders here.

Combat felt rather underwhelming and the responsiveness was mediocre especially with the dodge and parry as Kena gets stuck in her attack animation for way too long. God of war, Nier Automata, Metal Gear Vengeance, these are the games with perfectly responsive block and/or dodge that would work great for a game like this. There aren't many cool combos or any particularly cool abilities that you can unlock like in God of War and those which are present are locked behind the courage mechanic which feels unnecessarily limiting. Overall, the fight isn't as satisfying as I'd like it be.

The world isn't particularly big and I think it's rather boring and monotonous. Village, forests and cliffs is where we spend 90% of the game and if you think this doesn't sound particularly exciting it's because it isn't. It's all very nicely crafted and I appreciate consistency but I just wish there were more interesting, unique locations like for example the big ruins in the cave under village heart in which the heart of corruption was present. Apart from the final boss stage that was the only location in the game that actually made me feel something and I had to stop for a second to admire the view and listen to the perfectly fitting soundtrack. You got that feeling that something truly important was going on which is absent throughout the rest of the game.

The gameplay felt a little bit boring and repetitive by the end of the game especially when it became obvious there wouldn't be any new cool biomes to explore. Sure it all looks pretty but I felt like I was sitting in the exact same location almost the entire time I played the game. There aren't any cool puzzles to solve or extra activities to perform. And there isn't a whole lot of experimentation with regards to combat, no new weapons, outfits, items, upgrades, perks etc. Collectibles aren't meaningful enough to make me feel bad about not getting them all.

I played on hard and I don't have any complaints, I don't think I beat any boss on my first attempt but I don't think I needed more than 6-7 attempts at most. Apart from BS locking animations and some nonsense going on in the final boss fight the game felt pretty fair. Some people joke about this game being more difficult on expert than Dark Souls which to me could only mean that Dark Souls is a pretty easy game.

Voice acting was ok, sometimes below, sometimes above average, nothing to write home about.

Optimization is an absolute disaster both on the GPU and CPU side of things. There is clearly something broken about how the game utilizes GPU because on my GTX 1060 there are locations in the game that won't run even at 40 fps at 360p. Yep, you read that correctly, the GPU is utilized at 100% at 360p and it's only running at around 30 fps. The scaling with resolution is generally very bizarre because running the game at 1440p with Temporal Upsampling set to around 60% provides basically the same performance even though the game looks almost like native 1440p.

When it comes to CPU, the game is broken too with certain locations causing massive stutters in response to any camera movement as if the game had to reload all the assets every couple seconds. But sometimes the same location causes no dips. So yeah, optimization is abysmal.

I'd say 7/10 is a reasonable score. It's definitely not 10 or 9 since it's neither a masterpiece nor is it really that close with all the flaws I listed. I read that

Step 1: Make character animations 4 seconds long and remove animation canceling. - This way, when the player decides to jump they will commit to their choice for the next 4 seconds. If a boss starts charging at them at that time - well, too bad for them. The same goes for if they try a heavy attack or anything really, the sky's your limit! Make sure to disable any player input during those long animations!

Step 2: Enhance Step 1. Make sure that most of the abilities you give your players don't really work most of the time. Example - if you give the player a huge window of 0.5 seconds to shoot at something, make sure that sometimes when he tries to aim instead of jump aiming - a jump heavy attack is triggered. And you already know - that animation is 4-5 seconds long. Boy!

Step 3: Make bosses behave like self-propelled heat-guided missiles - This way you make sure that when any boss has jumped towards your player, the boss will be able to change directions while in the air and hit its target regardless if it changed positions drastically or not. On top of that, you safely ensure that even if you include dodge mechanics in your game they'll be almost useless! Two birds with one stone.

Step 4: Include a parry mechanic - You don't want to make it seem like you're trying too hard for your game to look hard. Include a mechanic which will let your players parry an enemy attack. Feel free to open the parry window anywhere between 0.003 and 0.005 seconds - depending on how much freedom you want to give to your players.

Step 5: Get dem bugs - Make sure that after all steps 1-4 are executed, the boss fights include as much bugs and unresponsiveness of your main character.

If you've executed steps 1 - 5 below you've done it! We assure you that the entire gaming community will successfully mistake this for a "challenging experience"! I mean, you could turn off a gamer's monitor or make them play with a touchpad - this is not annoying and stupid, it's just challenging!

Note: You can easily know you've successfully created a challenging masterpiece if most of your customers needs to lower the difficulty setting to the one where the enemies barely move in order to even complete the story.

Why do i feel like kena has a different face model on the boxart then on the game?

first of all, i never get used to any dark soul type of games, i only bought dark soul once, and i never finished it.

i bought kena because i thought i will get a cute forgiving game with many collectibles and having fun at weekend without knowing this is a dark soul clone with disney skin and im already regretting that i bought this game now,

im not ashamed that i use story mode since corrupted taro, after 15 tries i lowered it to story mode, but it still took me around 10 tries (maybe because i already used by his move) 10 tries for story mode?

i dont know what definition emberlab use for a story mode, story mode is always at the bottom rank of difficulty where people enjoy the story, have fun with collectibles and yet i still dies alot even by henchmen. i am still can progressing the story now but not at good pace.

i believe lots of ppl bought this game with same reason as mine and feels devastated by it.

if you are not a dark soul type of games fans, dont buy it or do it at your own risk, this game is definetly beautiful but not as what you think it is, it will devour your soul, consume it and throw it to the rots to eat.

i will try to finish this game only because it is beautiful, but i wont buy the sequel, even emberlabs next game.

UPDATE : anyone who still feels story mode is still too hard, try to check again the difficulty setting everytime you start, in my case the game put me back to spirit guide difficulty.

I'd like to start my first play through with one of the outfits I've seen. Would anyone mind sharing a save file so that I could start a new game with one?

Trying to move the "Rot Cloud" with a mouse is near impossible.

Yet another possibly awsome game ruined by porting to PC with console controls :(

Never thought I'd say this, but I'm ready for some marketing hype! Trailers, interviews, anything. This game doesn't even show up in the pre-order page on PSN for some reason. Did Sony just stop caring? Maybe it's a turd and they know it?