But behind the sparkling blue visual effects that light up every magic arrow, and beyond the cute bright eyes of each newly-discovered Rot (the name for Kena’s ever-growing band of pint-sized forest followers), there’s an underlying, Zelda-like focus on reshaping your environment by first figuring it out…and delving deep into your magic tool kit to change it for the better. No one’s going to mistake Kena for its old-school gaming inspiration - in part because its cinematic moments look more like a present-day playable story from DreamWorks or Pixar than a blocky, 64-bit game from 1996. But the key thread that runs directly from the greats of the N64 and PS2 era straight to Kena: Bridge of Spirits is that they’re all - how do we say this? - downright delightful. It’s tough to describe how Kena is both similar and yet distinct from the classic games that inspired it (think The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Okami). Early reviewers are falling all over themselves praising Ember Lab’s first video game outing - and after spending some pre-release time hands-on with Kena ourselves, we know why. But thanks to amazing visuals and a mystical forest setting that beckoned old-school, Zelda-like adventure, it moved to the top of fans’ wish lists almost as soon as that first trailer had played.įast forward to today, as Kena finally finds its way into players’ hands as a console-exclusive new release for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 (as well as PC, via the Epic Games Store). Hailing from tiny VFX studio Ember Lab, Kena: Bridge of Spirits met the world back then as a never-before-seen indie game. Lurking amid all the blowout announcements that Sony made when it first showed off its next batch of PlayStation games last year was a beautiful little adventure game that no one had ever heard of.
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