Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess Review (PS5)

Capcom is absolutely dialled in right now; everything it touches seems to turn to gold, from major releases to smaller experiments. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess certainly fits into the latter category, and it's a terrific time for fans of real-time strategy with a twist.

Being able to control a hero character in amongst the frenzy of a battle you're dictating might not be completely new, but it's given a fresh feeling by that battle being very much tower defence-inflected. Over the course of a 10 to 12-hour playtime, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a delight, albeit with a couple of rough edges. In fact, you might end up wishing it were just a little longer.

The game's story is told almost entirely without dialogue. It opens with the player character, Soh, attempting to stave off an invasion of demons called Seethe from the top of his mountain home, protecting the local shrine maiden Yoshiro as she performs rites to banish them. They're overcome, though, and the mountain is overrun; the game is essentially a procession down its slopes, in retreat but cleansing the land as they go.

This manifests in a mission-based structure — as you wind your way down a campaign map you'll stop at shrines, abandoned villages, and tunnels to stop off and take on each one's challenge. Once you've completed a location, you're tasked with allocating resources to repair it over time, a simple and eventually slightly tedious bit of base-building that yields upgrade resources and unlockables. Diving into those missions, though, is the real meat of the game.

Kunitsu-Gami puts you in Soh's shoes in a series of arenas as he guides Yoshiro down a set track to a gate she must purify. Occasionally you'll choose between two branching paths, but either way, you'll still be facing the same task. You'll have a daytime period in which to run around the stage, finding patches of demonic energy to purify yourself, earning points that can then be spent on the villagers you find and free around the place, converting them into martial units.

At first, these will be limited to simple archers and axemen, but before long you'll unlock more costly options that have the power to, for example, freeze enemies in place briefly, shoot explosive cannonballs from a distance, or even heal their fellow units. You'll place these around Yoshiro's final position as the day falls into night, at which point the combat will start, requiring you to survive until morning.

This means the arrival of enemies from set locations: festering gates that spill demons out and see them tramp towards the maiden, slowed by your units, any obstacles you've managed to construct, and your own skills. Soh is a swordsman, after all, and you can sweep through fields of foes more devastatingly than the units you order around. This means that each night divides your attention in two — where you should be, fighting fire and cutting demons down, and where your units should be, providing covering fire or blocking off a lane entirely.

It's a really fun balance, with a classic rock-paper-scissors element to your choice of units based on the enemies arriving, and further twists are thrown in fairly regularly (each used at least a couple of times) to make things more challenging. There are stages where you're not able to take part in combat yourself, and can only provide orders; others see you on a floating armada of boats, struggling to stop any of the crafts from being sunk; another type requires you to keep lanterns lit around the stage to be able to target enemies.

Your ability to actually give commands comes through a time-pausing menu that lets you cycle through your units and place them around the map, although you're limited by your field of view and location; there's no simple way to look around the whole map while paused. You also have to be right next to a unit to heal it or change its role (which you'll need to do often in later stages), so prepare for Soh's relatively slow movement speed to become a little annoying.

Soh's actual combat controls are serviceable but noticeably nowhere near as smooth as a good Dynasty Warriors character, let alone a Dante or Bayonetta. This arguably helps to balance your power on the battlefield, but it makes investing in Soh's skill-tree lack allure compared to upgrading your units' capabilities. That upgrade tree is fully refundable at any time, though, which is great for experimenting with different units and tactics.

Most stages last for more than one night, and often a handful of days as you pace yourself through maps, stopping at the right moment to get a buff for the night and affording yourself more time to build enhancements, like cannons or sharpshooting towers. Managing your units through these repeated engagements is challenging fun, backed up by generous nightly checkpointing which means you'll rarely, if ever, have to restart a whole mission from scratch if you fail.

Still, it's fair to say that, by the time credits rolled, we were still looking for a truly gruelling stage — the opportunity to really score a backs-against-the-wall victory against the odds. Those put off by high challenge can be reassured that Kunitsu-Gami is more approachable than you might think. What do sometimes demand more skill are the boss fights that you unlock between most stages. These act as mandatory barriers to your progress, some introducing new, more powerful foes, while others are a little more unique (and frankly, sometimes tiresome to actually fight).

From a top-down perspective but with a lot of camera control, the game looks quite lovely at times, although it's a little low on environmental detail. Those demon models are ravishingly weird, to make up for it, and we didn't have any performance issues while playing. Kunitsu-Gami's soundtrack deserves mention, too, a lovely blend of smooth and calm melodies with funky prog-rock in its most heated moments. Also on the sound front, you'll want to turn down your DualSense controller's speaker in the PS5's system settings, as the game sadly makes fairly obnoxiously constant use of it with no toggle to turn it off.