Capcom is absolutely screwed right now; everything he touches seems to turn to gold, from big releases to smaller experiments. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess definitely fits into the latter category, and for fans of real-time strategy with a twist, it’s a great time.
Being able to control a hero character in the midst of the fury of a battle that you dictate may not be entirely new, but it adds a fresh feel to the fact that the battle is heavily influenced by tower defense. Over the course of 10 to 12 hours of gameplay, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a delight, albeit with a few rough edges. In fact, you might wish it was just a little longer.
The story of the game is told almost entirely without dialogue. It begins with the player character Soh attempting to fend off an invasion of demons called Seethe from the top of his mountain mansion, protecting the local shrine maiden Yoshiro as he performs rituals to banish them. However, they are overcome and the mountain is overcome; the game is essentially a procession down its slopes, retreating but clearing the land as it goes.
This is reflected in the mission-based structure – as you make your way around the campaign map, you’ll stop at shrines, abandoned villages and tunnels to stop and take on the challenge of each one. Once you’ve completed a location, you’re tasked with allocating resources to repair it over time, a simple and ultimately somewhat tedious bit of base building that yields resources for upgrades and unlockables. However, 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 he must clear. You’ll occasionally choose between two branching paths, but either way, you’ll still be faced with the same task. You’ll have a time of day where you’ll be running around the stage, finding patches of demonic energy to purify yourself, earning points which you can then spend on villagers you find and free nearby and turn them into combat units.
At first, they’ll be limited to simple archers and axmen, but before long you’ll unlock more expensive options that have the ability to freeze enemies in place for a short time, fire explosive cannonballs from afar, or even heal your teammates. Units. You place them around Yoshiro’s final position as day turns to night, at which point a fight begins that requires you to survive until morning.
This means the arrival of enemies from designated locations: rotting gates that pour out demons and see them stomp towards the maiden, slowed by your troops, any obstacles you’ve managed to set up, and your own skills. Soh is a swordsman after all, and you can cut through fields of enemies far more devastating than the units you order around. This means that each night splits your attention in two – where you should be, fighting fire and slashing demons, and where your troops should be, providing cover fire or blocking the path entirely.
It’s a really fun balance with the classic rock-paper-scissors element of selecting units based on incoming enemies, and other twists are thrown in fairly regularly (each used at least a few times) to make things more challenging. There are stages where you cannot participate in combat yourself and can only issue orders; others see you on a floating army of boats trying to stop one of the vessels from sinking; another type requires you to have lanterns lit around the stage to target enemies.
Your ability to actually issue orders comes via a time-pause menu that allows you to navigate units and deploy them across the map, even though you’re limited by your line of sight and location; there is no easy way to look around the entire map while paused. 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 the later stages), so be prepared for Soh’s relatively slow movement speed to become a bit annoying.
Soh’s actual combat controls are serviceable, but noticeably nowhere near as smooth as a good Dynasty Warriors character, let alone Dante or Bayonetta. This probably helps balance your strength on the battlefield, but investing in Soh’s skill tree lacks appeal compared to upgrading your units’ abilities. However, this upgrade tree is fully reversible at any time, which is great for experimenting with different units and tactics.
Most stages last longer than one night and often several days as you traverse the maps, stopping at the right moment to get a buff for the night and giving yourself more time to build upgrades like cannons or turrets for sharpshooting. Managing your units through these repeated encounters is challenging fun, supported by generous nightly checkpoints, meaning you’ll rarely, if ever, have to restart the entire mission from scratch if you fail.
Still, it’s fair to say that by the time the headlines rolled, we were still looking for a truly grueling stage – an opportunity to really score against the odds to win against the wall. Those put off by the high stakes 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 progress, some introducing new, stronger enemies, while others are a bit more unique (and frankly, sometimes tiring to actually fight).
From a top-down perspective, but with plenty of camera control, the game looks quite beautiful at times, even if it’s a little short on environmental detail. These demon models are amazingly weird to make up for it and we had no performance issues while playing. Kunitsu-Gami’s soundtrack also deserves a mention, a wonderful mix of smooth and calm melodies with funky prog-rock in its hottest moments. As for sound, you’ll want to mute your DualSense controller’s speaker in the PS5 system settings, as unfortunately the game uses it rather annoyingly all the time without a switch to turn it off.
Conclusion
It might not feel as novel as its billing, but Kunitsu-Gami is still a lovely little game with a seriously absorbing hook that will make you wish it was longer than it actually is. The constantly spinning platters are impressive, although it’s actually a bit minor at the final weigh-in.