“Trailers are hard,” I said to the communications person at Capcom America after putting down my controller at my Summer Game Fest demo for Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. He had heard some variation of “this is not what I expected” from many journalists and critics who darkened the doors of the Capcom tent that weekend in June.

I wasn’t searching for something to say. I meant it with my chest. Kunitsu-Gami was the not the game I expected. I expected something that leaned heavy on action, light on substance. What I got instead during that demo, and certainly during my playthrough of the finished game, was a dizzying real-time tower defense management game oozing with slick visual design. I couldn’t and still can’t decide if my idea of this game was malformed because of false suggestion or because of a lack of attention.

Kunitsu-Gami is the great mid-budget major studio film they just don’t make anymore. Art that’s far from perfect — what a silly thing to aim for, anyway — and memorable beyond its time.

A Dash, A Dance

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess tasks the player with protecting divine Yoshiro down a majestic mountain, cleansing villages, caves, temples, and lakes of a demonic infestation. Soh, the masked, sword-wielding player character, is Yoshiro’s consort bound by duty to be her swift feet and iron fist.

The game is separated by clearly-defined levels, most of which begin with a sequence where Soh must cleanse the area of all demonic rot, rescuing villagers, breaking down barriers, and carving a path of light for Yoshiro to follow at a snail’s pace. These sequences occur in the daytime. By night, demonic gates open and out flood the Seethe, the colorful enemies of Kunitsu-Gami.

Keep Yoshiro alive during the night and you’ll live to carve another day, guiding Yoshiro to the gates blocking her pilgrimage so she can destroy them and continue down the mountain. All of this requires resources in the form of crystals, little orbs you collect from cleansing areas and killing enemies. This is a lot for one sword fighter to handle. Fortunately, the villagers you free can be put to work with class assignments and managed as extensions of the player. This is the loop. New classes are unlocked by fighting bosses, classes can be upgraded with resources, and levels begin to pulse with increased complexity, necessitating experimentation and strategy.

As Soh, you are exterminator and babysitter, simultaneously the most powerful being in the field of battle and helpless to do everything on their own. These daytime preparation events reminded me a bit of Bioshock 2, where setting up your Home Alone booby trap room is half of the challenge. You have your preferred setup, but will it be enough to handle whatever the Seethe throw at you when the sun sets? You can use extra resources to change classes on the fly, though you have to be next to the villager in order to do this. The good news is if you want to guide a villager to a different location, you can do this from afar.

When the gates open at night, you’re in the more active phase of the game. Soh’s preparation gives way to hacking, slashing, and dancing away the demons chasing Yoshiro. The player has two main attack modes — light and dance. Light attacks are quick and easy to string together while dance attacks are slower and can be chained in special ways. Soh is equipped to deal with almost everything thrown at the crew, with special attacks able to hit flying enemies and ground mobs, but you’ll need to rely on your villagers to protect Yoshiro and deal with threats that might not be at the main gate.

Through the main campaign, you’ll collect equippable trinkets that will give Soh passive abilities, active abilities, and abilities that bolster the effectiveness of your villagers or Yoshiro herself. There are reliable combinations I found, including an electrified sword and ground rumble attack, but a lot of this is available to the player in order to accentuate a preferred play style.

Horrible Little Freaks Good & Bad

The art direction of Kunitsu-Gami deserves a moment of praise. In an industry where AAA game publishers are attempting to solidify the notion that the grays and browns of the 2010s are thoroughly behind us, Capcom is truly leading the way with examples like this. The costume design, the flowing effects of Soh’s dancing sword, the neon-kissed hues of the Seethe’s creeping auras…at times, Kunitsu-Gami is a visual feast. The mask design of each villager class is unique and beautiful. Even Yoshiro’s alter when you make camp is lovingly crafted.

But we have to talk about the little freaks. Kunitsu-Gami is absolutely packed to the gills with horrible guys trying to corrupt Yoshiro and the countryside. Each enemy type has variants that will make appearances out of the gate like your favorite football players when they take the field. The camera zooms in, showing us every little detail of a new creature that’s coming to kill all of us. And it keeps happening. All throughout the game’s modest runtime we’re getting new introductions like a credits sequence of the gnarliest TGIF sitcom. It rules and the team at Capcom knows it. Want a guy who rips his jaw off so his horrible tongue has more room to do gross stuff? You got it. Flesh straightjacket carrot guys who suck to look at? Have a million of them. Demon priests with smoke heads? I hope you like a few varieties of those guys! Worms? Oh buddy.

Visually, this game can be stunning, but I also ran into some crowding issues. As you start playing levels with higher numbers of villagers at your disposal, I found that the UI combined with the richness of the environmental, creature, and combat art could start to run together. If every villager and the main action is all put in one small area, the health bars for your villagers and for Soh will start to block components of the map and the top third of the screen is busy with UI elements regardless. This messiness can sometimes bump into gameplay, too, where you might be closer to a different villager than you think and can accidentally change their class when you meant to change a different villager’s class.

When you’re managing active action sequences and managing the tower defense aspect of the game at once, you’d ideally want these visual elements to be as distinct and out of your way as possible. This exacerbates another issue I had with Kunitsu-Gami: its camera. This game is a really incredible throwback in many ways to the PlayStation 2 era. It exists to engage the player on its own wonderful terms. It exists after it is completed for the player to master its many systems, not for the player to grind multiple currencies in modern post-game contrivance. It is a blessing in so many ways that point to a less goofy time in gaming. But, yes, I wrestled with the camera the entire time. Welcome to 2001.

I tried adjusting the axis direction multiple times, attempting to find the combination that would work for me. I never found it. Even until the very end I was struggling with finding the action and getting the right angles on the battlefield. Only a few levels are sprawling enough that they’d require a free camera, otherwise I think the game could’ve zoomed out a bit and just gone full isometric. It’s important at this point to also admit that I’m terrible at real time strategy and only marginally better at tower defense games, so my panic sets in for this exact genre much faster than I’d imagine the average player experiences. Still, these issues were enough to make a few levels — especially a couple boss fights — pretty frustrating for me.

A Risk, Rewarded

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a gem of a game. Made with what appears to be a relatively modest budget by the same internal studio that makes Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, this game is Capcom’s most self-contained package that isn’t a sequel or derivative in many years. It has no desire or mechanic to meet the player outside of itself, aside from the time spent dwelling on what a nice time they had playing it. It sounds radical because in 2024, it kind of is.

Despite the game’s lack of visual legibility at times, camera problems, and villager management quirks, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is a profound reminder of what simplicity can look like inside one of the industry’s largest studio groups.