GameCentral plays several hours of Capcom’s strange new action strategy game, that channels the weird invention of the PS2 era.
It’s always interesting to see what games companies do when they’re winning. The towering success of the PlayStation 5 has, for reasons that are still not fully understood, turned Sony into a sullen hermit, while the common response from many Western publishers, like Activision and EA, is to give up bothering with lesser titles and double-down on the one or two that sell the most. So, while previously they may have published some smaller titles, once their cash cow is established they no longer feel the need.
Clearly, Capcom doesn’t publish anything on the scale of Call Of Duty or EA Sports FC but it’s enjoyed a celebrated run of critical and commerical hits ever since the Resident Evil 2 remake in 2019. And what have they done with that newfound wealth and influence? They’ve allowed their developers to make whatever they want, which has resulted in Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess – a game so ruthlessly Japanese it’s almost impossible to translate its name, let alone explain what it is.
We certainly didn’t understand what it was until recently, when we got to play several hours of the game and gain at least a rough grasp of what it’s all about. The best way we can think to summarise it is as a real-time strategy game mixed with Onimusha, in terms of both the simple combat and magic use, and the reliance on Japanese mythology. That doesn’t come anywhere close to describing how odd the game is though, or how much we enjoyed playing it.
At this point, we’ve asked three different Japanese language experts about the phrase Kunitsu-Gami and all of them have given the same furrowed-brow expression of confusion when they see it, before suggesting that it doesn’t really translate into English at all. Which only further endears us to the fact that that’s what Capcom decided to call their game. The closest match though seems to be ‘gods of the land’ or perhaps ‘local deity’, but ultimately it doesn’t matter as the Path Of The Goddess is much more descriptive of the gameplay anyway.
We weren’t allowed to see the opening of the game, so we’re not sure exactly how the set-up is presented, but basically you’re at the top of a mountain haunted by demons and a slowly creeping miasma. You play as a warrior/shaman call Soh who is trying to protect a shrine maiden name Yoshiro, who is able to purge the ‘defilement’ as the pair of you work your way down the mountain and through several villages.
Yoshiro’s method of defilement removal involves walking incredibly slowly between one torii gate and the next. In the real world these are typically found at the entrance to a Shinto shrine, with the ones in the game acting as checkpoints, until Yoshiro makes it all the way to the torii at the other end of map, where all the demons are pouring out of it.
Because she’s so incredibly slow (she’s dancing as she goes – there’s a lot of dancing in Path Of The Goddess) she can only go a certain distance in one day and you don’t want her to stop just outside the last torii gate, or the wrong side of a destroyed barrier that you could otherwise have reconstructed to protect her.
Building things requires crystals, which are gained from defeating enemies and purifying defiled parts of the scenery (Soh can do a certain amount of purification himself). Often this will also free a villager, who during the day you can order to build things, like barriers or platforms to fire a bow and arrow from. You can also use crystals to turn villagers into one of an increasingly wide range of class types and even switch types on the fly.
Initially, the only option Is woodcutter but later on there’s archer, shaman (a healer, basically), spearman, sumo wrestler, ascetic (they can slow enemies down to a crawl), and thief (to dig up hidden chest during the day. Each type can upgraded half a dozen times, with their own skills trees, and judging by the menu there’s a lot more class types we never saw.
The first few levels we played had only four villagers at a time, but we played a later one with eight and apparently it can go up to 12. Once night-time rolls in you then position the villagers wherever seems most sensible, and then sit back and hope your preparations were enough, as the monsters start to pour through the final torii.
Soh’s combat abilities are fairly solid, with a small number of combo moves and a wide range of magic options, with several spells available at once that you can flick through. As Command & Conquer veterans we found the initial few levels pretty easy but if Soh does die he appears as a floating cloud that can still direct villagers around and do all the strategy stuff as normal.
If you can last long enough he’ll then reincarnate and you can continue as before. This only happened to us once, when much tougher enemies started to appear- after Capcom skipped us ahead to what looked like a quarter of the way through the game. Nevertheless, the one thing we’re uncertain of is exactly how difficult the game is going to get and whether it’s going to be frustrating being mobbed by huge crowds of higher-level monsters.
We’re prepared to believe, or at least hope, that Capcom has balanced things properly, as a lot of thought has clearly gone into the game, with a mountain of additional skills, magic abilities, class types, and buffs to unlock. With each village you rescue you can go back to it from the main menu screen, to unlock more secrets, which risks becoming overwhelming if not introduced at a slow enough rate – although what we played sequentially seemed fine.
Visually, the game is obviously low budget, but you can see Ōkami has also been an influence in terms of how the game’s trying to look like medieval Japanese artwork – and the idea of turning the world into a more picturesque version of itself. But that’s mixed in with some almost Giger-esque elements for some of the more interestingly horrific backdrops and monster designs.
We liked everything we saw of Path Of The Goddess and while there are questions to be answered, by playing the full thing, it’s definitely one of our most anticipated games of the year. It reminds us of PlayStation 2 era Capcom, not because parts of it are faintly like Onimusha, but because that was the last time that big Japanese publishers didn’t seem to care whether some of their games weren’t immediately approachable for Western audiences.
Clearly, this isn’t going to be a big seller but hopefully it will stand as proof that major publishers can afford to experiment and make things just for the hell of it, if the budget is appropriately low. That alone is worth striving for, but there’s also a good chance that Path Of The Goddess could turn out to be one of the most interesting and enjoyable action strategy games of the last several years.
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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