Take the maiden to the temple. Defeat all the demons that stand in her way. Cleanse the mountain of its impurities and restore the land to its natural harmony and splendor. This is Kunitsu-Gami: The Path of the Goddess in compact, and one of my favorite things about it is how little it strays from that humble, plain concept. In a sea of bloated sequels and creatively bankrupt knockoffs, Path of the Goddess is a fun, detail-oriented game that combines strategic planning and action, with no room for detail.
Developed by Capcom, the game is available for PlayStation 5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC on July 19. Path of the Goddess combines the feel of third-person action Ninja Gaiden with tower defense management for people who hate the sound of those words together. Think Gears warshorde mode with swords instead of guns and the sensitivity of the classic PS2 version EyesOne moment you’re assigning roles to your allies and giving them orders on the battlefield, the next you’re furiously spamming combos, trying to fend off tough enemies that are out to kill you all.
To buy Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess: Best offer | Humble Package
Based on Japanese folklore, Path of the Goddess combines history and myth to create a stunning and immersive journey that feels like reading a series of poems. You control Soh, a masked warrior guarding Maiden Yoshiro on her way to rid the mountain of evil spirits called Festering Seethe, who have taken over the mountain and corrupted its inhabitants. There is almost no dialogue and almost no story. Cutscenes are compact, few and far between. Instead, Path of the Goddess moves you from one level to the next quickly, with the main campaign carefully structured between escort missions, boss fights, and time spent rebuilding the places you’ve liberated from Seethe. In that respect, the game feels refreshingly old-school.
Each stage begins at dawn. You run around building defenses and traps, cleansing animals, plants, and villagers of pollution, and collecting translucent pink orbs that remain as a key resource. These orbs are spent to pave the way for Yoshiro to slowly perform her cleansing ritual across the map. They are also required to upgrade villagers for various roles, from melee lumberjacks and long-range archers to healing shamans and tough sumo wrestlers. Spend all of your orbs on Yoshiro and you are defenseless. Waste them all on your allies and she dies in the water.
After a few minutes, night falls and the Seethe begin to arrive through the gates and attack in waves. While the villagers can easily defeat the petite enemies, the larger ones require quick attention. It is here Path of the Goddess‘ action gameplay comes in. Soh has basic single-button combos that do decent damage, but adding a bulky attack at the end of each combo strings together a series of dancing sword attacks that can be controlled but not canceled. It’s like winding up a ballerina and then watching her slice through hordes of enemies. It’s a petite but novel innovation that makes combat feel fluid and satisfying even in its simplest and most repetitive form.
Path of the Goddess But it doesn’t end there. Soh has a dodge and guard attack with a time-parry mechanic that adds an extra level of depth. Repeated attacks will momentarily stun the enemy, but Soh’s guard can break if used too many times in a row, leaving him frozen and defenseless for several seconds. Soh also has a special meter that slowly fills up, allowing him to unleash a variety of ultimate attacks that can turn the tide of battle at crucial moments.
It’s a tight combat loop that slowly becomes more captivating as you play as you unlock up-to-date abilities and find items that grant you special perks. A petite skill wheel lets you invest in a few dozen upgrades, like a higher-risk, higher-reward combat stance and charge attacks that break up the enemy’s stagger meter more. The result is moment-to-moment combat that feels mighty and agile without being overwhelming, and built on enough customizable elements that you feel like you have some meaningful strategy options for each up-to-date encounter.
The second significant part of this strategy is your villagers. Each time you defeat a boss, you’ll get a up-to-date mask that represents a different role that you can assign to the villagers who aid you on your journey. You start from scratch with each mission, enrolling anyone you meet along the way into your demon hunter crusade. Basic roles require fewer bullets but aren’t as powerful. Such as the Sumo, which aggro enemies, or the Cannoneer, which has a sluggish rate of fire but deals high damage, cost more.
They all have different strengths, weaknesses and apply cases, and one of the many things is Path of the Goddess gets right doesn’t make any of them feel dated or redundant. My absolute favorite though is the wizard. He charges up a spell that gives you a map-wide superpower that you can apply immediately if they’re still alive. It’s like getting a nuclear kill streak Call to duty and it has saved my ass many times.
Boss fights, for the most part, prioritize enemy designs and animations over unique mechanics. Most of them look amazing, even if gameplay-wise they weren’t the highlight of the game for me. Few things feel better in Path of the Goddess than to knock the giant Seethe on its back and then call in my troops to raise hell. I still think of the giant poisonous toad that my gunners shot out with giant fireworks all at once, killing it even while I was still immobilized.
There is only one thing that is dragging on Path of the Goddess down and that’s the settlement rebuilding section. Once you’ve liberated the village, you can go back and explore it without any enemies, which mostly means going around different sections and assigning workers to repair a house, bridge, gate, or chapel, which are on a timer to complete after a certain number of battles. There’s no real need to prioritize one set of repairs over another, and the most helpful rewards are for completing each repair at a specific location on the map, meaning you’ll have to do all of this at some point anyway. So after every frigid battle there’s a clunky and perfunctory maintenance phase that would be easier to manage from the map’s main menu.
It’s an unpolished system as far as strategy games go, and it stands out in part because of how well-balanced and well-thought-out the rest of the game is. One of the things I particularly like about Path of the Goddess is a user interface that seems woven into the very fabric of the experience. Soh’s health is displayed via a scroll next to his body, the upgrade menu for his skills is the hilt of his sword, where you swap out tassels and runes, and the save screen is a long piece of folded paper on which a stamp appears.
It’s the little touches of polish that make an already great game even better, and it reminds me of the PS2 era, when more games felt like they were trying to find their own path rather than following in the footsteps of what everyone else had already done. It’s that spirit of authenticity and unwavering commitment to a distinct vision that makes Path of the Goddess so refreshing now, especially at this level of budget, production, and quality. When so many games feel like they could be made by anyone for anyone, Path of the Goddess seems like something special, created for people who never knew how much they would love it. Such inventive swings don’t always work out. Path of the Goddess Definitely yes.
To buy Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess: Best offer | Humble Package
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