Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess Review – An Exciting Concoction

So, we were chilling on the sofa watching Summer Game Fest 2024. There were good games all around, the vibes were positive, and the alcohol was flowing. Then, I imagined that I had a fever dream when the trailer of this game was revealed. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess was advertised as a tower defence game with a heavy focus on action hack-and-slash combat and the aesthetic of a PS2 Japanese cult classic.

My first question was: What the hell was Capcom thinking? This was immediately followed by: Who is this for? What kind of hallucinogenic drugs was the financial department on when the pitch for this game was made? Honestly, I have no idea, and, going even further, I don’t even want to know. I wouldn’t want to tempt fate as long as games like these get greenlit and released.

After all, these madmen did it; Orcs Must Die in feudal Japan, baby!!!

TL;DR

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a tower-defence game, as much as I am a functioning human adult… In image only and with a lot of asterisks. Welcome to a project created as a Frankenstein’s monster, only to have all the body parts come from supermodels, with the result being not half bad. The gameplay focuses on managing mobile units with specific roles while you beat the shit out of anything that dares to come close to the most anime woman I have ever seen.

The visuals are heavily based on Japanese mythology and have enough colour and edges to take you back to your PS2 nostalgia era. And lastly, the sound and music make me feel things that I would only like to discuss with a trained professional. If you want a linear experience with handcrafted tower design levels and an emphasis on solid hack-and-slash gameplay, then this game is for you.

Story: Down the Mountain, We Go!

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess has a lot of positives and negatives as a game. Quantifying the story in any measure of them would be very hard since, for something to be measured, it needs to exist first. The story is almost nonexistent in Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess and can be described in a single sentence: Escort and protect a priestess, Yoshino, down the mountain while cleansing all evil spirits, or Sethee, you find on your way.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing since many tower defence games put a heavy load on gameplay more than anything else. The point of Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is not to explore intricate character-building arcs or to emote on tragic scenes and relate to unfortunate characters. The point of Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is to beat up Japanese evil spirits with a katana while a sumo wrestler, a musketeer, and a woodcutter make sure your escort mission runs smoothly by protecting the payload.

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Visuals: Japanese Myth

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess has a fascinating art style. The game’s aesthetic is based in feudal Japan, with heavy supernatural elements taken from Japanese mythology. The palette is colourful, and every texture is thick with details and exaggerated sharp edges. The most suitable comparison would be a PS2-era game that has been reborn in 2024 but keeps its spirit and core intact.

The enemy Sethee visuals are incredible. They combine body horror with visual Buddhist elements and characteristics of Yokai, Japanese mythological creatures. Their textures and animation exude this feeling of a different form of life that looks strange in our own plane of existence. Some of them are so bizarre and unsettling that the human eye cannot tell where the head of the creature is until it pops out of its own ribcage.

Let’s also talk about your warriors, though. In Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, your warriors are amazingly distinct as characters. Every role has its own uniform and can be easily recognised by the intricate mask that represents it. Where Path of the Goddess really shines is in the animations.

Soh, our main character, and all the warriors who will help you on your journey have extremely smooth and realistic animations for each situation. This gives the characters a sense of reality, of compact weight, forcing you to understand the weight of its hit and the recoil of every coalition the characters and the Sethee have with each other.

Another point of brilliance that shines throughout Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is the models. I have never in my entire life seen models so detailed and lifelike when it comes to the items the game has. Every hand guard for Soh’s katana has been beautifully and painstakingly handcrafted. Every dessert and snack that gets offered to the priestess looks like an accurate historical representation of feudal Japanese cuisine. And every artefact that you discover exudes feelings of nearness and ancient history. Truly an amazing effort with exceptional results.

My one gripe about the Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess and its visuals is that sometimes, there may have too much flavour. At the end of the day, the job of a menu is to relay clear information. Unfortunately, everything in Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is heavily stylised. In some particular cases, this can cause a problem if the player has to spend time figuring out what exactly they have to press.

Gameplay: Fine… I’ll Do It Myself.

So, let’s talk about the meat of the game, the gameplay. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a tower defence experience with heavy hack-and-slash action elements. The gameplay loop has you start to play in a series of levels where the objective is to escort the priestess until the final hurdle, with some levels only being boss battles here and there.

A significant difference with other tower defence games and what also sets Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess apart is that, instead of having to defend a stationary gate and place your towers next to the routes leading to that target, in this game, the objective you have to protect is moving on a specific path, giving you the ability to stop it and choose your ground of defence.

In any other game, this would be a horrible mechanic since the towers lose all their strategic positioning value. In Path of the Goddess, though, the villagers, or your “towers,” can move, giving you flexibility and helping you focus primarily on adaptability during the defensive fights. The spawning points of the Seethe also change during the cycles, forcing you to change your strategy constantly.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess operates on a two-phase cycle for its gameplay: day and night. In the game, your defence target proceeds down a path that must be completed for the level to end. That is also when you organise your villagers and prepare defences for the oncoming assault. The night phase is when the Seethe starts attacking and involves surviving the oncoming onslaught until the brink of dawn.

So, let’s talk about your villagers and Soh. In Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, every level has a set number of villagers who can be turned into combatants and help you defend Yoshino. Every role must be assigned a specific cost from a crystal resource. Crystals can be acquired by defeating Seethe or even by doing small miscellaneous tasks. It is the player’s choice how to allocate their limited resources and create an optimal defence group for Yoshino’s survival.

The combatants that the villagers turn to can fill many roles in your extermination of Seethe. Tanks, healers, long-range damage dealers focused on single targets, or even area-of-effect damage are just some of the simplest options for adapting to the never-ending Seethe flood.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess provides a fairly decent balance of power between the masks by having each of them fulfill a specific function efficiently but be a sub-optimal choice for the other ones. This doesn’t mean that your towers have only a static power level, though, since they can be upgraded and gain permanent stat and functionality bonuses through your campaign.

Of course, having “towers” that are able to move and block paths can be used to spawn camp the Seethe before they even have a chance to become a danger to Yoshino. And unfortunately, because of that, the game suffers in the challenge department.

I was never really challenged during the whole campaign. That statement also holds true if you consider that I completed around seventy per cent of the content as a completionist. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess just doesn’t provide a challenge worthy of respect as of yet.

That leaves us with Soh, the commander of the masks and the character you will control. Soh actively participates in battles using his katana and a slew of other interesting abilities stemming from the magic power of his blade guards.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess equips you with an exciting hack-and-slash move set that can be used to destroy every Seethe even before it comes close to your masks. Although the mechanics are not extremely in-depth, they offer a really cool experience, and your mastery of them can be the difference between an easy win and a very disappointing loss.

Parries, counters, a bit of archery, and even timed executions are some of the things that you can expect if you go ham on the Soh upgrade skill tree. But beware: Soh and the villagers share the same resource for permanent upgrades. It is your decision whether a stronger Soh or more effective villagers are your most significant necessity in protecting Yoshino.

Last but not least, let’s talk about the game’s small base-building elements. In Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, every level that you cleanse with the help of Yoshino will become habitable and visitable after you beat it. At these levels, small construction projects can be undertaken by the same managers that you mentioned before.

Every small project completed gives small rewards, varying from crystals, artefacts, or even desserts for Yoshino. Completing a certain number of missions requires these base-building elements. Although I’m not a big fan of these elements, they are a visual representation of your progress in the campaign and offer a cosy atmosphere that makes Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess all the more enjoyable.

Sound: Traditional Goodness

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess has a very interesting take when it comes to sound. The general soundscape is serviceable, nothing sounds out of place, and the mixing feels competent. Where the game really shines through is the music and voice acting, particularly the enemy voice acting.

Let’s start with the voice acting. The game provides very small amounts of it when it comes to Soh, Yoshino, and the villagers. Soh is always completely silent, and the only sound that Yoshino makes is a phrase notifying you that you let the enemy get too close to her during the battle passes. The villagers also have some batteries and off-hand phrases that are there just to give the player a bit more immersion.

The interesting stuff involves the Seethe mainly. The enemy variety in the game is pretty good; that is true regarding visuals, mechanics, and voice acting. The voices that come out of Seethe’s mouth are distorted and alien to the player’s ears. It feels like the corruption that must be cleansed doesn’t only affect the solid objects but the soundscape of reality as well.

The players will experience trembling voices with wavelengths stretched to the extremes of the sound spectrum, animalist grunts, and even unrecognisable sounds while defending Yoshino.

And now, let’s talk about music. The Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess music soundscape is so interesting that I had to literally re-listen to specific parts just to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. You see, music in the game is separated into two categories: what you hear in the base build portion of the cleansed levels and what you hear while going through the actual fights.

The first category of music is standard. Relaxed and a bit melancholic tunes build a tranquil atmosphere around you as you observe the villagers in their reclaimed habitat, rebuilding what the Seethe have destroyed. It is a lovely choice for these environments, and although there are only three soundtracks, I find myself pausing for a few minutes sometimes just to listen to them.

The second part is the battle music that Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess provides, and it is incredible. As mentioned before, the game operates in a day and night cycle, one being for strategising and the other for combat. The music follows the exact same rotation but in a much more fascinating transition. At the beginning of the day phase, you are treated to soft sounds of traditional Japanese instruments that get more intense and rhythmic the closer you reach the middle of the phase.

This continues for a bit until you realise that, with the night phase coming closer, subtle distortions start prickling your ear. This culminates at the end of the day phase with loud distorted strings, raising the tension and swallowing the instruments offered at the beginning in a coherent order.

The exact same situation follows the music of the night phase. The closer you are to daybreak, the more melodic the music becomes, blossoming from distorted strings to Japanese drums that dictate the rhythm ideally and give a sense of order and symmetry.

Conclusion: An Answered Prayer

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is an unexpected little gem that took me by surprise. It has solid gameplay with satisfying action elements and a lot of replayability, as well as a stellar visual design based on Japanese mythology and Lovecraftian aesthetics.

The soundscape is serviceable but gets elevated from the music score somewhere around the stratosphere. It feels like a PS2 game made flesh in the year 2024 and is colourful, interesting, and an interesting risk for a CAPCOM in its own right. For the price of fifty euros, I could not recommend it enough. Buy it, play it, and wonder why companies don’t take wonderful little risks like this game in our current year.

I’d like to thank CD Media for giving me this chance to play this wonderful game.