I’m just a boy, standing in front of an unseen virtual audience, asking them to play Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. There are hundreds of thousands of video games in the world, and there is nothing out there even a little bit like Capcom’s new action/real-time strategy game. I’m so in love with its innovative, masterfully woven, eye-opening weirdness, and I simply need people to know about it. If you feel AAA games have stagnated in their design, concept, or execution, Capcom has brought down a building-sized hammer on that claim, and that hammer’s name is Kunitsu-Gami.
Kunitsu-Gami is a perfect meeting of real-time strategy, action hack ‘n slash combat, and tower defense. I’ve described Kunitsu-Gami to my friends as “Pikmin but Olimar is Sekiro and also it’s Bloons Tower Defense.” It’s an insane concept just by it’s description, which makes it all the more impressive that Capcom has not only made the concept work; they mastered it on the first try.
You will take control of Soh, a warrior sworn to protect the priestess Yoshiro. A foul defilement has taken over the mountain which they call home, and dozens of different kinds of demons based on monsters from Shinto mythology have invaded the land, infecting nature and bringing death. The only way to cleanse the defilement is for Yoshiro to perform a ritual dance across each level every day, one which takes a very long time and moves very slowly. Soh must purify villagers in each level and command them in RTS gameplay each night, joining them in the fight with combos, special attacks, and some juicy hack ‘n slash goodness. Slain demons drop crystals, which are used to open the path for Yoshiro and assign classes to villagers.
When you arrive at a level at the beginning of the day, there is much to be done and so, so little time. Stretching down the middle of the level is a pathway coated in black smoke. Soh must spend time purifying the pathway so that Yoshiro may dance her way across it towards the Torii gate the end of the pathway in pursuit of cleansing it. You’ll also need to spend precious seconds searching for and freeing cocooned villagers, purifying defilements, finding items, managing your carpenter’s repair schedule, and preparing your troops for the oncoming demon horde. And you can only get these things done as fast as Soh can run between them across these large areas. Once you enter a level, it is nonstop stress, anxiety, and heart-pounding terror until the final gate is cleansed. And I absolutely love it.
Once night falls, all bets are off. The carpenter runs to hide, all repairs must cease, and no more villagers can be rescued. You make do with whatever you’ve managed to gather, and assign classes to your villagers. You’ll gain a new class more or less after beating each boss, which basically fall into the groups of melee, ranged, and support classes. Melee classes include woodcutters which are great for running quickly and doing moderate damage, or sumo wrestlers that do massive damage very slowly, or even spearmen who can reach far away targets without abandoning their positions. There’s over a dozen classes in all, and after the first two or three levels you’ll need to start experimenting with configurations based on the level design. Too many flying enemies? We need more archers. Too many fast enemies? I need an Ascetic to slow them down. So on and so forth.
During the night, the main Torii gate on the other end of the arena as well as one other gate will open, and demons called Seethe will begin to crawl out and attempt to kill Yoshiro. You’ll be commanding your troops’ placement and classes in real time as the fight back the demonic hordes. The majority of the enemies are basic Seethe appearing in waves, but don’t worry about enemy variety. Kunitsu-Gami features over 40 different unique demon types, each with their own movement patterns and special abilities. Some will have scythe hands, some will spit fireballs, some enchant other demons to greater strength with ritualistic dancing. My favorite demon, the Enenra, quietly slips out of the gate you’re not looking at and hides in a corner behind a building. It then whispers an incantation to curse Soh, preventing you from healing or using abilities, until you track it down and interrupt its incantation. I cannot describe how unique and well designed each of these demons are; you’ll have to see for yourself.
Each level as you make your way down the mountain is progressively a little more complicated. Some will present multiple paths to travel down; many feature contraptions you must build during the day such as cannons, traps, platforms and more; others still will infect Yoshiro herself, removing Soh from combat entirely. Each of the 20 levels in Kunitsu-Gami features a new gimmick, and every single one of them simultaneously makes the game more fun and challenging. Even the toxic swamp stage, which had me audibly weeping while trying to prepare before the night time, turned out to be a masterpiece of level design by the time I defeated it with Yoshiro right on the edge of death.
Each level in Kunitsu-Gami is followed by a boss fight, with that boss smartly taking advantage of some game mechanic you learned during that level. Yoshiro is placed in an arena, and it’s up to you and the troops that are assigned to you to figure out a way to kill the boss demon before it kills her. I had to redo many of these boss fights experimenting with different loadouts; beyond trying different class configurations for my troops, there are special abilities that are unlocked called Tsubasa, as well as charms that provide passive effects. By leveling up Soh you can have up to three special attacks at a time, which have cooldowns during battle, and up to five charm slots. With 12 Tsubasa and 80 charms to collect, there is literally no end to the loadout configurations you can achieve. One of the things that has impressed me about Kunitsu-Gami so much is that despite the complexity of the design, you really can play the game to your own strengths and figure out a way to make it through. There’s no “optimal build” for any stage – the optimal build is whatever you can make work.
After beating a level, you can return to it between stages to assign the villagers to work on rebuilding it. Each structure takes x number of days to rebuild, and different structures offer different rewards. Some will give small gifts like Ema plaques to commemorate your defeat of a specific demon, or food to use for healing during the night. Others will give Mubushi, a currency that allows you to upgrade Soh and each of your classes individually with new abilities and more strength. This is really nice because it gives a sense of completion once the village is rebuilt, and you can slowly see the spread of finished villages behind you in the distance as you continue plowing down demon mountain. You’ll need to remember to revisit your past settlements between each stage to gather supplies for the more powerful monsters you’ll face in the next one.
One thing Kunitsu-Gami has in spades is personality. Beyond the vibrant colors and impeccable Shinto-inspired art design, everything in this game feels alive and real. There’s a small feature where you can unlock Japanese desserts for Yoshiro and gift them to her for the simple pleasure of watching her eat one and enjoy it with no mechanical benefit. While fighting during the night, each of the classes has a different idle animation that is a different Shinto dance. I cannot stress how much more fun this makes the game, as I’m screaming and slicing my way across a demon-infested bridge while my archers break dance behind me. Even the UI has personality, all drawn in the style of parchment from ancient Japan. Kunitsu-Gami is so proud of its roots in Shintoism and makes every effort to shove these artifacts, symbols and rituals in your face without explaining them, and I love it.
Alas, I did have a major technical problem with Kunitsu-Gami. Over the course of my 15 hours through the campaign, I had 10 crashes to desktop that seemed to be triggered by nothing in particular. Most of them were at convenient times after I had just saved, but the last one happened during a boss fight and was quite annoying. I’m sure this problem will be fixed, but outside of this issue I had no tech problems, bugs, glitches, or frame rate drops of any kind.
Kunitsu-Gami has a lot of replay value, offering you the chance to replay stages whenever you like with additional challenges. Challenges range from “Kill the boss in three minutes” to “make sure Yoshiro takes no damage” to “don’t use any archers to win.” There’s probably enough here to double the length of the game for those who care to attempt them, and I think I may give some of the early levels’ challenges a shot with my souped-up high level Soh in the future.
Kunitsu-Gami could easiliy have stretched itself too thin, trying to manage a Pikmin-like RTS with a hack ‘n slash horde combat as well as settlement management and tower defense. Saying that it stuck the landing is an understatement. Capcom has quite simply mastered this new type of game they’ve created in one stroke, and it is without a doubt one of the most competently made games I have ever had the pleasure of playing. It is on both Xbox and PC Game Pass, and it has a demo on Steam and PlayStation 5 as well.
Every level is better than the last, every new demon is scarier and more memorable than those before, every heart pounding war drum song makes my eyes open wide in fear and concentration. I have never been as locked in to a game as I was during the levels of Kunitsu-Gami, and it took every ounce of my intelligence, resourcefulness, and sheer will to make it through. Be warned, this game is not for the weak of heart; it features some of the toughest bosses I’ve ever fought, and drained every ounce of brainpower I had. However, if you are in search of something fresh, innovative, unique, and unparalleled in its intelligence, you can do no better than Kunitsu-Gami.
Nirav played Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess on PC with a review code.
