Keen: One Girl Army Review
By my count, America has now been through five weeks of sustained protest against police violence and racial injustice, and it feels especially important to keep that in mind today, a day in which we’re expected to celebrate America’s greatness. Despite reduced media coverage, I want to do my part to remind people that there are still both protests and injustices happening in America. As we all strive to fight for justice and equality in our ways, I hope, as always, you remember to take the necessary down time to rest yourself and prepare for more and, like always, my chosen method is playing and reviewing video games. This week, I decided to look at Keen: One Girl Army, the story of a young kid fighting against a corporation whose only goal appears to be evil for evil’s sake, which seems pretty plausible these days.
Keen: One Girl Army mixes turn-based combat with puzzle gameplay and follows the story of Kim, an 8-year-old girl training to be the guardian of her village. Under the tutelage of her grandmother, Kim has been following this path for the entirety of her short life, learning to wield a glaive and harness magical powers. But, because all 8-year-old children are difficult, Kim has also decided to incorporate roller skates into her fighting style. This means that as Kim fights enemies, she can only move in straight lines and only stops moving when she collides with some obstacle, turning the fights into weird and dangerous sliding tile puzzles where, if you perform badly enough, you die. So players must guide Kim through fight after fight against zombies, robots, and other monsters in a quest to discover the cause of the invaders attacking her home.
I’ve never been a huge fan of puzzle games, mostly because I’m not very good at them, but I had a fun time playing Keen thanks to two things: the inclusion of turn-based combat and excellent puzzle design. Though it might reflect poorly on me, I really did enjoy the puzzles in Keen a lot more because a big part of the puzzles was eliminating all of the enemies in the area. Kim can only move in straight lines, thanks to her aforementioned roller skates, and every time one of those lines crosses an enemy, Kim deals damage enough to kill almost every enemy. If, at the end of the move, Kim is next to an enemy, she deals half as much damage and stuns them to keep them from moving or attacking that round. Aside from some special unlockable powers and occasional situational hazards, these are the only tools Kim can use to dispatch her foes, meaning players have to carefully plan where they move to effectively dispatch foes while remaining relatively unharmed. But even without the combat, Keen’s puzzle designs were very impressive to me thanks to great design, especially in the later levels and the hidden bonus stages. There were a number of puzzles that were a treat to unravel thanks to clever design choices including puzzles that required careful work over the span of multiple areas across the level and puzzles that had to be constructed and deconstructed during the execution of them to accomplish multiple objectives. Easily my favorite of these was in one of the game’s many bonus levels, unlocked by obtaining specific numbers of glowing orbs, where I had to use obstacles to maneuver with then immediately destroy after I was done with them. I think just about everyone will have a great time working away at these puzzles, because if I can, anyone can.
While the puzzles of Keen are wonderfully designed, just about everything else is boring, underdeveloped, or both. This was immediately apparent to me when I was told that Kim’s grandmother was named Gramma, her mother was named Mother, her home village was named Village, and the nearby city is named City. I don’t know if this choice was made because the developers are located in Brazil and these names preempted the difficulty of translation, but this naming convention made the whole game feel like it hadn’t finished being written yet. On top of that, the game has some underwhelming writing. None of the villains have any interesting motivation or back story, they are simply being evil because they are evil, but the game hardly stops to reflect on why people do evil things, just that bad guys are bad guys because they’re bad guys. It’s all so unsatisfyingly simple. Keen also throws out the old gaming story chestnut of “this is all just a simulation” near the beginning but doesn’t do anything with that or pose any interesting questions about that subject, except for a meager nod near the end, and tries its hand at social commentary, trying to make a statement about organized religion and corporations, but doesn’t do any actual work with those ideas so it all feels half-baked. Not every game has to have a deeper message, but if a game starts down that path, it should at least walk the rest of it instead of giving up after an hour. It’s possible that there’s more on this subject locked behind the game’s final bonus level which requires the player to collect all 50 of the power orbs scattered throughout the game, but I’m neither talented nor patient enough to figure all of those challenges out and I can’t imagine many other people are either, so I almost hope that there’s not some incredible secret true ending hidden behind a challenge nearly no one will beat, since the story is so weak without it. Finally, the thing that bothered me the most: at no point do any of the characters address or explain Kim’s penchant for roller skates, which is extremely weird since it’s basically the core of the game.
There’s nothing wrong with a game concerning itself with only being one thing and doing that well, just take Islanders for example, but Keen doesn’t shoot for that goal because it included a weak story and underdeveloped writing. And Keen is three times the cost of Islanders on top of that. I think Keen is good but needed to take a firmer stance on whether it was a cute, tricky puzzle game or if it wanted to be a bigger, grand adventure. If you like puzzles, you’ll probably enjoy Keen, but you should wait until it’s cheaper than $15.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
