After 25 years of gaming and 11 years of game journalism, it's rare for me to sit down with a game and have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. It's a treat, in an odd way. Even with unfamiliar genres or out-there mashups, I can usually bumble my way through with muscle memory or context clues. But, perhaps due to the California sun baking my brain at the Summer Game Fest venue, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess utterly stumped me for about 10 minutes when I got some hands-on time with it. "Am I doing everything wrong?" I worried. "Do I not like this game?" I wondered.
Not so, it turns out. It just took a minute for the game's controls, and its combination of action and tower defense, to properly click in my head. Once everything did, I quickly fell in love. I thought back to my time with the underrated Sanctum games, an FPS tower defense hybrid, and my brain got on the right track. In an instant, Kunitsu-Gami went from confusing to making-me-smile exciting. I'm serious: this was one of the coolest things at SGF, and it's one of Capcom's most promising 2024 releases.
