Capcom is in great shape right now; everything it touches seems to turn to gold, from major releases to smaller experiments. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess certainly falls into the latter category, and it’s a great time for fans of real-time strategy with a twist.
Being able to control a hero in the midst of the frenzy of a battle that you dictate may not be entirely new, but it does give a fresh feel to this battle that is heavily influenced by tower defense. Over the course of a 10-12 hour playtime, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a delight, albeit one with some rough edges. In fact, you may end up wishing it were just a little longer.
The game’s story is told almost entirely without dialogue. The player character, Soh, attempts to repel an invasion of demons called Seethe from the top of his home mountain, protecting the local shrine maiden Yoshiro as she performs rites to banish them. They are defeated, however, and the mountain is overrun; the game is essentially a procession up its slopes, retreating but clearing the land as they go.
This manifests itself in a mission-based structure: as you progress through the campaign map, you stop at shrines, abandoned villages, and tunnels to pause and take on each one’s challenge. Once you’ve completed a location, you’re tasked with allocating resources to repair it over time, a simple and possibly slightly tedious task of base-building that yields upgrade resources and unlockables. But diving into these missions is the real meat of the game.
Kunitsu-Gami puts you in the shoes of Soh in a series of arenas as he guides Yoshiro along a set path to a gate that she must purify. Sometimes you’ll be given a choice between two branching paths, but in all cases you’ll always be faced with the same task. You’ll have a daylight period during which you can run around the stage, finding areas of demonic energy to purify yourself, earning points that can then be spent on the villagers you find and release around the location, converting them into martial units.
At first, these weapons will be limited to simple archers and axemen, but you will soon unlock more expensive options that will allow you to, for example, briefly freeze enemies in place, fire explosive cannonballs from a distance or even heal their comrades. You will place them around Yoshiro’s final position at nightfall, at which point the fight will begin, forcing you to survive until morning.
This means enemies arrive from specific locations: festering gates that pour out demons and see them advance towards the girl, slowed by your units, the obstacles you’ve managed to construct, and your own skills. Soh is a swordsman, after all, and you can sweep through fields of enemies more devastatingly than the units you’ve sent out. This means that each night divides your attention in two: where you should be, fighting fire and taking down demons, and where your units should be, providing covering fire or blocking a path altogether.
It’s a really fun game, with a classic rock-paper-scissors element to your choice of units based on the enemies that arrive, and other twists thrown in fairly regularly (each used at least twice) to make things more challenging. There are levels where you can’t participate in the fight yourself, and can only give orders; others see you on a floating armada of boats, fighting to keep one of the ships from sinking; another type requires you to keep lanterns lit around the stage so you can target enemies.
You can issue orders through a time-pause menu that lets you cycle through your units and place them on the map, though you’re limited by your field of view and location; there’s no easy way to cycle across the entire map in pause mode. You also need to be right next to a unit to heal it or change its role (which you’ll need to do a lot in later stages), so be prepared for Soh’s relatively slow movement speed to become a bit annoying.
Soh’s combat controls are effective, but they’re not as fluid as a good Dynasty Warriors character, let alone Dante or Bayonetta. This certainly helps balance your power on the battlefield, but it makes investing in Soh’s skill tree less appealing than upgrading your units’ abilities. That upgrade tree is fully refundable at any time, though, which is great for experimenting with different units and tactics.
Most levels last more than one night, and often multiple days, as you progress through the maps at your own pace, stopping at the right times to get a nighttime bonus and giving yourself extra time to build upgrades like cannons or sniper towers. Managing your units through these repeated engagements is a fun challenge, aided by generous nighttime checkpoints, meaning you’ll rarely, if ever, have to restart an entire mission from scratch if you fail.
It must be said that by the time the credits rolled, we were still looking for a truly challenging stage, a chance to pull off a back-to-the-wall victory against all odds. Those put off by high challenges can rest assured that Kunitsu-Gami is more accessible than you might think. What sometimes requires more skill are the boss fights you unlock between most stages. These act as mandatory obstacles to your progression, some introducing new, more powerful enemies, while others are a bit more unique (and frankly, sometimes annoying to fight).
From a top-down perspective but with plenty of camera control, the game looks very pretty at times, if a little lacking in environmental detail. Those demon models are delightful and bizarre to make up for it, and we had no performance issues during the game. Kunitsu-Gami’s soundtrack is also worth mentioning, a nice mix of soft, calm melodies with funky progressive rock in its more fiery moments. Also on the audio front, you’ll want to turn down your DualSense controller’s speaker in the PS5’s system settings, as the game unfortunately makes pretty constant and unpleasant use of it with no button to turn it off.
Conclusion
It may not be as new as its name suggests, but Kunitsu-Gami is still a lovely little game, with a really captivating hook that will make you wish it was longer than it actually is. The plates it spins are impressive, even if it’s actually a little light in the final weighting.