In 2016, it produced a short film, entitled “Terrible Fate,” based on The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Until now, Ember Lab has solely been an animation studio, comprising fourteen core developers. There is something charming in its unreality, a willingness not to simulate the world but to lavish it with the exaggerated praise of a cartoon. One forest stretches so bewilderingly upwards that we can’t make out any branches all we get are thick pillars of brown, piercing a layer of computer-grown cloud. Kena looks as if she could be patched straight into a Pixar movie, and the world around her is dense with carefully drawn detail. Her clashes involve simple four-hit combos and charged-up power-swings there is a nice parry, with a punishingly narrow timing window and the puzzles, all entailing the lighting of beacons and crystals, require no great brain power-only that you pay mild attention to your surroundings.įortunately, paying mild attention to your surroundings is one of the game’s great pleasures. Other than this, however, her quest could, if you scrape off the enamelling of its graphics, sit comfortably beside its older inspirations. Her staff bends into a bow, and the bowstring, when pulled back, causes a leathery tremble in the controller. Kena, on the PS5, has one really good trick.
#Kena bridge of spirits release date time series
It was the latest in a series that began on the PlayStation 2, but its action was encrusted with wondrous gadgets-none more so than the PlayStation 5, whose adaptive triggers and haptic feedback massaged simple mechanics into something more, widening the rift between then and now. But what about Kena’s adventure, which harks back to a formula that, while perhaps not broken, was certainly beginning to creak? We might look to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, for a lesson in keeping things fresh. Hence games such as Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon Zero Dawn, glittering blockbusters with singular visual styles, planted in that most people-pleasing of genres: the open world. On consoles, the game arrives exclusively on PlayStation (on both generations of hardware) and, in its own way, exemplifies one of Sony’s most cherished principles, which is that, if it isn’t broken, one should spend as much money as possible not fixing it. Whether you demand more than comfort from your games will inform the way you see Kena: Bridge of Spirits is it merely a graphically sumptuous example of design that you wish we would leave behind, or is it a vivifying tribute to a rich precursor legacy?
If you thrilled to the likes of Beyond Good & Evil, whose heroine, Jade, also swung a staff, and to Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, with its lush environments of jungle and its corruptive pools of “Dark Eco,” you will find comfort here. The game is a bridge, of sorts, a cross between past and present and the developer, Ember Lab, has a solid plan of action: to console the spirits of those who dearly miss the early-millennium platformers of the PlayStation 2. If you are a restless player, hanging around the digital plane and lamenting the passage of time, you may run into Kena: Bridge of Spirits. Bad news, if you are one of the wraiths who refuse to move on.
At her casual command, they move boxes and lift obstacles, and even lend a hand in combat, swarming Kena’s enemies like a flock of overly cute crows. The tools of her trade are a staff-forged, by the looks of it, from the gnarled boughs of a tree, with a blue gem wedged into one end-and a platoon of dark, bug-eyed helpers, called Rot. She is a spirit guide, a cross between a counsellor and a sanitation worker she cleans up ghosts as though they were spillages, but she does so with a consoling word and a solid plan of action. If you are a restless spirit, hanging around the earthly plane and lamenting the passage of time, you may run into Kena.
0 kommentar(er)
