The world of Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is meant to feel fantastical and from another time, but the game itself also feels like an anachronism. Something that shouldn’t exist in 2024. It’s not a sequel in a hit franchise. It’s not working in a popular genre. And it’s not pandering to an international audience. It’s just an excellent game, and it shows what’s possible when big publishers take a chance on something completely different.
“We believe it is important to respond to the expectations of our users with new titles in [existing] series and remakes, but we also believe it is equally important to take on the challenge of creating something new,” the game’s producer, Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, a more than 20-year veteran of Capcom, told Kotaku in a recent email interview. “As a completely new title, we are taking on a number of challenges.”
Path of the Goddess has you play as the sword-dancing warrior Soh, who must rally villagers and protect the Maiden Yoshiro on a treacherous journey to purge evil from a mountain. But instead of a straightforward third-person action game that has you exploring levels and slicing through hordes of demons, Path of the Goddess is structured like a tower defense game where, in addition to killing enemies yourself in fluid arcade combat, you can also conscript villagers into unique classes and order them around the battlefield.
One key was to make sure that neither side overshadowed the other and each was viable in its own way. “We did not want to force players to have to use both elements equally, so we spent a lot of time adjusting the balance between action and strategy,” Kawata said. “Therefore, players could enjoy more [of either one], depending on their equipment and assigned villager roles.” It’s an unlikely mashup that works surprisingly well and doesn’t sacrifice quality to realize its experimental creative vision. It’s also presented in a context that’s unabashedly Japanese.
“I am a fan of old Japanese folklore and other bizarre folktales, and I thought it would be interesting to incorporate them into a game set in the mountains of Japan, where a messenger from the other world appears every night and you must fend them off and protect the gods,” said the game’s director, Shuichi Kawata, also a long-time Capcom employee. “A major part of this idea was that I thought it would be compatible with tower defense. I think we were able to make every aspect of the game cohesive by incorporating player actions and the relationship between the enemies with Japanese culture.”
Path of the Goddess features dozens of intricate and evocative enemy designs for the evil spirits you face, called The Seethe. Some have heads shaped like massive mouths with tongues jutting out of them. Others look like pearly white tumors floating through the air with dangerous hooks hanging off the bottom of them. In one stage you face a massive corrupted tree whose roots come alive and attack you like a giant mutant earthworm. Their variety and level of detail is one of the key ways the game punches above its weight.
But the other main thing that helps Path of the Goddess stand out is just how bespoke and carefully considered every small detail of the game feels. “Mixing multiple game elements will always increase the complexity of the game, but it is important to choose carefully what is and isn’t necessary for the game,” said Kawata. “In order to prevent the game from becoming a ‘grinding’ game, I think it is important to allow the users to think about what to do based on the given game materials, and the result should lead to a sense of accomplishment.”
The UI is carefully integrated with the rest of the game’s look and feel. To access the main menu, you have to go into a village and visit Yoshiro’s tent where a table in front of her collects the various ornaments, artifacts, and other objects you’ve gathered throughout your journey that double as the game’s power-ups, status-enhancing relics, and other unlockable upgrades. You increase the level of your villagers’ roles by decorating their masks, and the save screen is a long horizontal piece of folded paper that you stamp with each new file. One of the game’s collectibles, an array of desserts, sit in a nearby box for you to examine at your leisure.
There are over 20 stages in Path of the Goddess, and each one has two phases to it. The result is three to five enemy waves per stage with generous checkpointing. While no gameplay ideas were discarded during its development, testing revealed that most of the stages originally felt too long and drawn out, so they ended up making them shorter. “Many people commented that this part of the game was tiring and made the play time longer, so we decided to shorten it and increase the tempo of the game progression.”
The game feels stripped down to its essentials, preserving only what’s elegant, polished, and meaningful to the overall experience. Where other games devolve into ticking boxes on a marketing strategy, Path of the Goddess feels bereft of bloat. It’s the opposite of the open-world RPG with skill trees, gear scores, and random loot that pads itself out with extra hours of content just to hit a certain number on How Long To Beat.
“I think that the sandbox in a playground is similar to this situation, and used that concept to explain it to my team,” Kawata said. “The scope is fixed and the use of sand is fixed, but you are free to use the sand to your liking.” This is part of why I think people keep referring to it as a PS2 cult-classic or lost PS3 game. It feels made for an era where a good idea, cool look, and fun gameplay were enough, if not to sell millions of copies, than at least to convince a well-known publisher to take a chance on something new.
Before pitching Path of the Goddess, Kawata directed Shinsekai: Into the Depths, an underwater action puzzle game on Apple Arcade that was later ported to Switch. Much of that team was carried over to Path of the Goddess, but developers from other bigger-budget Capcom franchises like Resident Evil joined as well, bringing additional know-how and experience with the RE Engine that’s become increasingly standard across all of Capcom’s portfolio (Monster Hunter is also moving to it with Monster Hunter Wilds). Still, Hirabayashi said the team remained “relatively compact for the size of the production volume.”
Unlike a lot of those games, however, Path of the Goddess is priced at $50, just below the premium next-gen price tag of things like Street Fighter 6 and Dragon’s Dogma 2, but just above cheaper Steam games like Helldivers 2, whose $40 price many regard as a key component of its runaway sales success. I asked what goes into making that call, which anecdotally some PC players feel is still too high.
“As a completely new title, we have taken on a number of challenges, such as a ‘unique Japanese-inspired setting’ and a ‘new gaming experience’ that combines action and tower defense,” Hirabayashi said. “We have decided to set the price as affordable as possible to allow as many people to get their hands on this game.” He stressed that the size of the game is comparable to a full-price game, but you can see Capcom hedging in the fact that Path of the Goddess is also “free” for paid Game Pass members on Xbox and PC. When I asked previously at Summer Game Fest how that deal came about, Hirabayashi said the goal was to try to get the game in front of as many people as possible, given it was an unknown IP in an unusual genre.
I hope it works. We’ve seen that a bold vision that delivers and a cult of enthusiasm from fans isn’t always enough to guarantee a sequel or a chance to continue building on the work that came before. That’s now the sad story of Hi-Fi Rush, the 2023 GOTY contender from Tango Gameworks. That studio was founded by Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami (Kawata and Hirabayashi were on the cinematics team for Resident Evil 4, the last one Mikami directed), who left a year before Microsoft announced it was shutting down Tango Gameworks.
As exploding development costs push publishers to retreat into proven sellers and popular licenses, there’s a real fear the top end of the gaming industry could calcify even more than it already has in recent years through remakes, sequels, and live-service lottery machines. When I asked if we might see more experiments like Path of the Goddess from Capcom, Hirabayashi said he couldn’t comment on the larger company’s policy. “However,” he added, “as an individual, I am very grateful that there were so many people within the company who agreed with me to deliver this title to the users.”