But that's exactly where it fails for me. This is not a game with a lot of different actions - Kena wants you to wonder where to find something, rather than what to do with it. You restore ancient door's opening mechanisms and defeat their guardians to get to your next objective. Traversal is the largest part of the game - you navigate the forest by doing a light bit of platforming and climbing around on ledges that are all marked with the tell-tale splash of white paint. The fault may well lie with me due to my lack of patience with mechanically sound, but overly familiar games, but Kena tunnels you so smoothly from one end to the other that I was playing it as if on autopilot. But playing Kena gets very boring, very fast. This is a game that offers beautiful facsimiles of Zelda, Uncharted, The Pathless and Pikmin that glide by through its 10 to 15 hour running time. This is a complex topic, but I needed to mention it in order to illustrate where my problem with Kena lies. Sure, games aren't made in a vacuum, but if you've played a decent number of games before it's likely you'll tire of the repetition of well-worn ideas here. While Kena is also releasing on PC, this feels like a PlayStation game through and through - indeed it's so reminiscent of Sony's blockbusters of recent years that I'm surprised Sony has yet to buy developer Ember Lab. Enemies will drop a spirits' memento - once you've collected enough mementos, you can call the spirit, deal with their protests the old-fashioned way and then allow them to find peace. Some of these areas will turn out to contain a boss - it's kind of difficult to tell where, making boss fights seem less like special occasions and more like a way to break up the humdrum of fighting the same enemies in every clearing. Generally, however, you travel the forest until you get to a large, rot-infested clearing, an enemy will spawn for you to defeat, and afterwards you will clear the rot away by destroying a large rot flower. At certain points, rot can also temporarily transform into a large creature than can clear rot away that's blocking a path. Puzzles is perhaps a generous term for what you do outside of combat - mostly, the rot will carry a misplaced object such as a platform or an energy crystal to the right place for you to use.
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