When I first booted Kena, I'll admit to some skepticism. It felt very much like any other Unreal Engine game. Here's your character, here's the world. I felt as though I could see through the cracks of it as I maneuvered around the map.

Blissfully, the wizened, jaded part of my gamer soul was soon treated to and sent into the afterlife by our titular hero.

This game clicks in every way. The smooth-as-eggs combat, fun from the start but gradually becoming more exciting as you collect upgrades. The Zelda-esque semi-open-world collectathon layouts, and the dungeon puzzle design. The absolutely brilliant lighting, that shines with a 4K HDR display, and the sweeping soundtrack that will immerse you to the point of childlike wonder if you're wearing a pulse headset.

The story is neither here nor there. It was cute, and optimistic, and inclusive, but I felt like it could've played out without dialogue and I'd have understood everything. Perhaps that's a strength, actually.. there's little complexity, but there's a ton of heart.

There is a new game + mode, and plenty of trials to complete, so if you're loving this world and want to stick around, it gives you the means to do so. But I personally was whisked along by its brisk pace and felt that it respected my time to the perfect degree. By the time I'd completed the game, I felt very little desire to double back and collect what I'd missed. But it is exceptionally rare that a game actually tickles that bone so that's hardly a mark against.

It's a brilliant game, that harkens back to the pre- Last of Us ages where video games were allowed to simply be video games, and AAA development didn't need to concern itself with photorealistic graphics and dark narratives.

Kena is a winner.

Man. What a game this is. It was kinda weird to get a hang of at first. Basically, the story is told through these hand drawn pictures BUT the gameplay is all about you separating the layers of the pictures onto a 2x2 grid to progress the story. It's a fascinating gameplay mechanic. For example, at the start you see a boy, looking out his window at a scene of a god serpent dragon thing roaming through his town. He then walks out of frame and from there you have control, you click and drag on the window frame and it separate the scene into that of a window frame and what was seen through the window. You then zoom out from the section with the window frame to see more of the house the boy is in as he scrambles around trying to find something. Meanwhile, the scene outside the window can be ZOOMED in on and you can find a doorway. You then take that zoomed in doorway and layer it over the picture of the boy looking for the thing, and he is then able to leave his house into the setting he was initially looking at from the window, now zoomed in. It's wild! The whole game is like that too and it plays with your perceptions of time and space. The story is a simple "boy wants to appease gods with an offering" sort of thing but they way you the player move the story along and your attention to detail can definitely make the whole experience richer and more compelling. Huge recommend. It's not on game pass anymore but even still I'd say its worth buying. Short, sweet, and fantastic.

Delightful building management sim with shortcomings

Bear & Breakfast immediately caught my attention from the artstyle and wholesome tone. Day one purchase.

The first 3-4 hours are bliss. Takes a minute to get started but then you're managing multiple buildings, trying to design the best rooms based around multiple factors (decoration, comfort, hygeine) and finding materials to craft superior furniture and utilities. Days fly by and you have plenty to do.
The writing is clever and the NPCs can be pretty fun, especially at first introduction. Unlocking tools like the clock and map are super satisfying, although that may be because some of them feel like they should be included from the start.

My biggest hurdle that I never got quite over was introduced in the 3rd building... Cooking. Although I did get the hang of it, I just never found it enjoyable. The ingredients and recipes and "cooking" score just become too much to keep track of. There were also a couple times were I didn't know how to progress and it turns out I had to talk to a specific unmarked NPC. I also wish the NPCs had more to do. Unless you're in a quest with one, NPC just give you a generic 1 or 2 line response. Dialogue options would've made them feel much more dynamic.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Bear & Breakfast. And I'm sure some of the rough elements will be smoothed out with updates.

Miserable little game with a massive identity crisis. The game sells itself on being a cozy/wholesome management simulator, but management is extremely hands-off, and the game's writing constantly reminds you that wanting to build a bed and breakfast for profit is bad. By the midgame the only activity you spend any amount of time on is wandering around the game's maps like a tired, lost soul, hoping for materials to spawn or for NPCs to give you quests. There's satisfaction to building rooms, but furnishing them results in you building the same few objects over and over because there are no variants on the statistically best furniture.

By the endgame, it becomes clear there was no time for a QA pass. Guests ask for room qualities that are straight-out impossible to achieve. I'm pretty sure a cutscene that was supposed to happen just didn't play for me, leaving me wondering where my character was getting the new information he was saying. Story quests stop being marked as such in your journal, cinematic cutscenes are cut off in windowed mode, and the final exposition dump has a glaring typo in it.

I kept asking myself whether I liked this game or Moonglow Bay better, as they're similar in a lot of ways. In the end, though, I settled on Moonglow being the better game. It had a coherent story with an ending and didn't go on weird tangents about gentrification and the evils of pet owning (I think?). Stay away from this one.