Kunitsu-Gami - Path of the Goddess Preview

Teasers

As the guardian of a shrine maiden, you and your troops fight demons in mythical Japan and rebuild devastated villages in this somewhat different tower defense game.

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The setting of Kunitsu-Gami – Path of the Godess is just the thing for all fans of Japanese mythology. Here you explore Kafuku, the sacred mountain of the goddess. However, demons are roaming around it because an evil power has desecrated it. As the guardian of the maid Yoshiro, you save villages, fight the unholy creatures and help Yoshiro to push back the desecration.

The title, developed internally at Capcom, will be released on July 19, 2024, and we were recently invited to play some missions on PS5 – two early in the game and one roughly in the middle. Kunitsu-Gami will be sold for 49.99 euros and should offer you dozens of hours of fun.

Yoshiro, her guardian Soh and the troops also look good up close, from a technical point of view this is less true for the enemies and environments, but Kunitsu-Gami scores points with some beautifully quirky demon designs.

Fighting at night

Kunitsu-Gami is basically a tower defense game in which you protect the maid from the hordes of monsters. But it has its own unique touches. The fact that you get involved with the sword yourself is something we know from many other representatives of the genre such as Orcs Must DieWhat is unusual, however, is that you don't build towers and other defensive structures in the traditional way. Instead, you turn peasants into warriors, so that they can, for example, take aim at enemies as archers or, as ascetics, put a slow curse on nearby monsters. There are also walls or buffing relics, but you don't place them freely; instead, you have them repaired before an attack. In order to react dynamically to the hordes, you can only move the units, change the classes of your troops and heal them. In addition, you jump into the breach yourself when things get tricky.

The gameplay is linked to a day-night cycle. If you survive until sunrise, you use the day to invest the energy lost by monsters. You need this to recruit units or change classes, among other things. But above all, you have to use it to clean the maiden's black path, which she dances on to the demon gate. Once she has reached it, you can clean it with a final push of a button and the area is free.

This also means that the further you have come, the closer Yoshiro is to the enemy spawn point! But you can also order her to wait and not advance any further.

The action is not overly hectic: while you give orders, time stops. You use rations to heal yourself or units (health is stylishly displayed in the form of a paper talisman above the head). You can also assign a warrior a new role, but this costs just as much as turning a civilian into a fighter.

Reconstruction by day

But there is more to do during the day: all the farmers in a lost village are initially captured by demons and must be rescued. Once you have found them all, you can collect a reward in a shrine. There are also hidden treasures that you can have thieves dig up.

The regions to be liberated are individual missions that you access via the map. There are also boss battles, after which further classes are unlocked for the villagers. And then there is the strategic level: once a village has been saved, you can leave units behind so that they can rebuild buildings in order to receive rewards. You can also return to these liberated villages later, where Yoshiro will also adjust your equipment. Weapons and armor cannot be changed, but various buff talismans and sword modifications should offer you a selection of interesting loadouts.

Author: Hagen Gehritz (GamersGlobal)

Opinion: Hagen Gehritz

The setting of Kunitsu-Gami interested me straight away. Japan fans with a penchant for mythology and history can look forward to many references to the world of spirits and sacred rituals. There are also charming interactions with animals and villagers in liberated places.

I like the idea of leading units into battle rather than building buildings. The day-night cycle spices up the small but nice dose of exploration during the day, because I'm always thinking about how much I can examine and prepare before sunset. The mission design also not only relies on a growing number of enemy types, so in a fight around the middle of the game I was no longer able to get involved myself and had to concentrate entirely on using my troops well.

Although the environmental graphics in particular were rather rough in detail and the direct action felt a bit sluggish at the beginning of the game because I couldn't chain combos together very smoothly, otherwise this somewhat different tower defense action left a good impression and made me want more.

KUNITSU-GAMI

Preliminary Pro & Cons

Gameplay mix feels fresh in the tower defense context
Atmospheric scenario
Mission design not only relies on more enemy variants and larger waves

Sword fighting maneuvers could be linked more smoothly
Environmental graphics less pretty than models of the main characters

Current assessment

The setting of Kunitsu-Gami is just as special as its interpretation of the tower defense genre. The focus on dynamically commanding troops and the alternation between preparation during the day and survival at night (without the resource grind like in survival titles) has potential.