Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess review – the Onimusha strategy

Capcom’s strange new action strategy hybrid is steeped in Japanese mythology and unlikely gameplay mash-ups but does the mixture work?

Although most big publishers are pretending there’s no way out of the current predicament, of video games costing too much to make and taking too long to develop, there is one very obvious solution: don’t spend so much on them. But nobody even seems to have considered that idea and are convinced that they must make AAA blockbusters or nothing at all.

The logic is that you need massive budgets to reap equally massive profits, with most publishers having long since lost interest in any kind of middle ground. But the bigger the budget the smaller the risks that can be taken, and the less likely anyone is to come up with anything new or unique (cf. Concord). Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess is nothing if not unique.

For whatever reason, Capcom has decided to indulge themselves with this game and we’re very glad they have. The end result is far from perfect but it’s weird and imaginative and not quite like anything else we’ve ever played. As we said at the preview stage, it feels like something from the PlayStation 2 era, not in terms of the gameplay but in that exists purely because the developer had an idea they wanted to try – and not because the because the publisher had a trend it wanted to exploit.

Path Of The Goddess’ plot is both simple and confusing, as there’s almost no dialogue and even the name, Kunitsu-Gami, doesn’t translate easily into English (it means something like ‘gods of the land’ or ‘local deity’). The gist is that evil spirits of defilement have invaded a mountaintop and all the nearby villages have been overrun. Only a shrine maiden named Yoshiro is able to survive the initial assault and so summons an avatar named Soh to fight for her.

Although Soh can cleanse smaller outbreaks of defilement, including rescuing cocooned villagers, Yoshiro is needed to cleanse the torii that the creatures spawn out of. This takes time though and involves her very slowly walking (dancing, technically) from one end of a two-stage map to the other. Your primarily goal is to protect her until she gets there, using villagers to assist you in what is half action game and half real-time strategy.

The game has a day and night cycle, where the monsters only appear at night. This gives you time to cleanse minor defilements (find them all and you get a new unlockable buff), rescue villagers, and assign them roles and positions for the night ahead. At first you can only make them simple fighters or archers, but each boss battle unlocks a new role, from healer to sumo wrestler and spearman.

Since you know exactly where Yoshiro will be when night falls you can prepare by setting up villagers nearby, while also get them to cover other torii, that also spawn monsters, and using the single carpenter under you command to repair traps and barriers.

One obvious tactic is to keep Yoshiro behind a barrier, so at least one route to her is blocked, as the monsters barely have any AI and instead move along predetermined lanes, like League Of Legends and other MOBAs. This means they’ll actually walk past her sometimes, before looping back and attacking from an unexpected direction.

In theory this is all good stuff, with dozens of buffs to unlock, including by completing achievement-like challenges for each stage, and skill trees for each role and several for Soh himself. The combat isn’t complicated, but it’s enjoyable, with some simple combos to initiate more powerful dance attacks. There’s also lots of different yōkai style monsters, from basic cannon fodder that attack in groups to creatures that can possess villagers or act like mobile artillery.

The most immediately obvious problem with the game is that the selection screen for organising and ordering about villagers is the worst UI design we’ve seen in years. The multiple overlays and neon colours make it all but impossible to see who you have selected and the range is very limited, so you often have to move them in stages. The screen is also separate from the one that assigns them roles or gives them health, which makes the whole strategy element an absolute faff.

A more fundamental problem is that because the game’s influenced more by MOBAs than traditional real-time strategies, the maps are very small and usually over quite quickly. Because Yoshiro is always on the move you never have a permanent base and since she’s so fragile it’s too risky to position many villagers away from her. Instead, you end up just dumping them in a circle around her and hoping for the best – which usually works.

Apart from anything the game is very easy, increasing the impression that Capcom’s designers didn’t fully commit to the strategy element. We guessed long before it happened that the ending would just be straight action, but we were still shocked by how it immediately ditches the strategy elements as soon the game enters its final stretch.

It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of variety in the level concepts, including one with toxic pools of water, another in a darkened cave where a monster keeps putting out the lamps, one with no villagers, and a variant where Soh is stuck in spirit form for the whole level (something that happens if they die, but usually only lasts 30 seconds or so).

There’s a third element to the game where you help to repair liberated villages, in what comes across as a vaguely Animal Crossing style cosy game. But this requires absolutely no skill or thought, you just select the buildings to repair and come back later when it’s done. You don’t even get to feel good about helping out the villagers as they’re all wearing masks, all the time, for reasons that the game never properly explains. So there’s no characterisation or emotional attachment, as there might be in something like XCOM.

The best levels are the ones where Yoshiro is static and you actually have to think about where you place the villagers, since you can’t be everywhere at once. But there’s only a handful of these and all the other levels seem too easy and obvious by comparison.

Despite the many flaws we still enjoyed the game, but then we didn’t have to pay £40 for it (the fact that Capcom is sensible enough not to try and charge more is good to see). It is on Game Pass though, so if you have access to it there then we definitely recommend trying it out.

There are lots of good ideas in Path Of The Goddess but none of them seem fully formed, so in the end the best part ends up being the combat, particularly the boss battles. The art design is great too, with weird kaleidoscopic imagery for the defilements and backgrounds that look like what might have happened if H. R. Giger had decided to paint with a pre-schooler’s colour palette.

The soundtrack is also fantastic, and wonderfully varied too, with everything from traditional Japanese music to pounding techno beats. The various jazz tracks are particularly sublime and we ended up playing one of the boss battles a second time just to hear the music again.

Path Of The Goddess is a fascinating look at what happens when a big publisher lets its developers go off and do whatever they want, knowing the budget is low enough that they can’t get themselves into too much trouble. We loudly applaud Capcom for encouraging this and pour scorn on all those that do not – which is pretty much every major Western publisher.

But, sadly, the experiment hasn’t really worked. Path Of The Goddess is weird and wonderful but it’s also very slight and feels sorely underdeveloped. We’ve no idea if there’ll ever be another one, to try and address the failings, but we kind of hope not. Not because we didn’t enjoy it but because being unique and different was the central appeal and we need more games like that, whether they work out or not.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (previewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £39.99*
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Next Level Games
Release Date: 19th July 2024
Age Rating: 16

*Game Pass day one

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