KAKU: Ancient Seal | Review (2024)

I think one of the easiest ways to grab my attention is through bright, poppy colors. Forests and desert biomes help, too, because that’s what pulled me right into developer BINGOBELL’s latest open-world adventure title ‘KAKU: Ancient Seal‘. Featuring vast environments with puzzles, baddies, dungeons and violent creatures to clash against—players who love a good dungeoneering challenge will want to check this one out.

An Ancient Evils Stirs

KAKU: Ancient Seal starts us off with Kaku, a young boy on the hunt for a flying piggy. One thing leads to another and then suddenly he finds himself imbued with the special power of Awakening, necessary to take on the challenges ahead as he restores the four elements back to the main temple, floating high in the sky. These elements lie across four continents, and said regions are attuned to those elements. You have snowy mountains, a tropical paradise (in trouble!), desert dunes, and a lush green forest on the coast of a slumbering volcano. These locales are beautiful with bright colours and clear water running across the map and as you go deeper into them, the weather and environments evolve and get darker and more menacing.

These landmasses are pretty big and dense—the best way for you to navigate them is to unlock these crystal towers that act as fast travel points. Unlocking them is as easy as walking up to one and completing a short puzzle. They’re not difficult and if one stumps you, simply restart a bunch of times til the piece of the puzzle quite literally clicks in place. There are also ruin keys to find, random treasure chests, and plenty of enemies and encampments to take on. Not to mention the copious amount of rocks and branches you’ll be picking up—with the slight annoyance of the “pick up” button being tied to your sprint.

Exploring these islands gets easier with Piggy by your side. This flying pig can launch you across large chasms, a bubble to let you briefly walk on water, teleport you to the Shadow Realm Spirit Realm to upgrade your stats, and disguise as Ponpons (more on this in a bit). The Spirit Realm is a place where you can spend ores to upgrade your combat prowess, unlock abilities, and improve your cooking abilities. That last one is necessary as it’s important to heal up and get much-needed buffs to take on some of the harder bosses and foes.

This realm also houses challenge rooms that are unlocked with the Ruin Keys you find in the overworld. Completing these challenges increases your health and stamina bars and they can be no push over.

My favourite parts of KAKU were easily these dungeons. Whether it was the unlockable challenge rooms or the ruins deep within the islands themselves, these places challenged really test your abilities to weave through very tight platforms all the while avoiding projectiles and lots of spikes. Enemies here are stronger and I quickly learned how useful parrying attacks are against these baddies. The bosses can also be quite the handful as they chuck projectiles, collapse the battle arena, and do everything they can to send you to the “Game Over” screen.

Speaking of combat, outside of running about doing quests and collecting resources, you’ll spend a lot of time swinging your club about. KAKU: Ancient Seal doesn’t tie stats to equipment like other adventure titles, however—your combat prowess is improved separately through the Spirit Realm and armour is used to enhance and add additional properties to you and your attacks. Besides innate traits, you can also socket in these gems of sorts that add more buffs or unique skills, such as trading stamina regeneration for health or making parry windows larger.

The combat is fun and offers a lot of options for taking out enemies, but it can get clunky at times depending on the number of baddies on screen and the attacks they use. Sometimes swings will miss outright and both parties will stumble around til one person gets stunlocked. There’s also an Awakening power that will supercharge Kaku and make his attacks flashier and hit extra hard. But once you’ve unlocked parrying, simply learn to time your attacks as that will do lots more damage—trust me on that one.

There’s a lot to do in this game and I spent a lot of my early hours messing around the first island alone. Once I settled in and figured out the general cadence of the story quests, I did start to mellow out a bit on the overworld and what it had to offer.

Ancient Theme Parks

In KAKU: Ancient Seal, players will spend the majority of their time roaming the four regions. All the collectibles within them feel well-placed and enemies are placed in such a way where it feels like they belong. As you naturally roam around and collect items, your progression will continue at a nice pace and encounters become easier as you get more skills to work with. It sounds like it should all come together but yet there’s this lack of interactivity within these realms that frustrates me a bit. Hold your tea a moment.

Let’s look at the enemies. We have wildlife that hate you, Ponpon tribes or essentially “savages” that will attack you on sight, one or two mob types specific to the biome, and then there are golems recoloured to fit the element they’re protecting. There’s not much mob variety, but besides that you’d figure these types of enemies would hate each other and fight off one another upon an encounter. Sadly that is not the case: instead, enemies of all types will gang up on you at a moments notice, their attacks phasing through everyone except you.

This lack of infighting unfortunately alienated me from the game world as I felt more like I was on a theme park ride through beautiful scenery rather than being a part of it. Mind, there are environmental traps that impact everyone such as poisonous fauna and bees (oh my goodness, so many bees). But these entities are very obviously meant to shred you up rather than coexist along with the mobs and playable character.

There are also quests that involve the enemy Ponpon and the only way to approach these quest givers is to disguise yourself before walking up to them, otherwise you’ll end up having to wack ’em and wait for a respawn. This mechanic is annoying as it is timed and other Ponpon could see through your disguise if you hang around long enough. Juggling both this timer and disguise loss mechanics made me feel silly and I didn’t bother with these quests after a little while. An easy way to improve this is to simply remove the timer, as attacking or being spotted causes you to lose your disguise anyway.

When it comes to world and encounter design, I firmly believe that interactivity is a necessity to keep the player grounded while also giving them more natural opportunities to take on a challenge and, with all these in mind, I feel that KAKU falls short of that.

KAKU has its fair share of cutscenes and they look great. Some better than others, but when a cutscene is important to the game’s story, you can tell. There’s no voice acting, only grunts and squeals from the main and supporting cast. Dialogue is usually dropped through text boxes or through subtitles, but sometimes there’s no accompanying sound effects to indicate a line has been spoken. Quite often I missed out on text as I was sprinting about, though I imagine most of that was flavour text. The narrative is entertaining enough and no single character will talk your ear off. The English translation could use a bit of polish, but it does the job and will get you through the game with no issues.

But colour me impressed. When I think indie, I rarely think “open-world”, but BINGOBELL showed me that’s it’s possible to craft a great and ambitious adventure game without a large body count. KAKU: Ancient Seals is one of the best open-world indie games I’ve ever played and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for their fill of lush environments and challenging dungeoneering. ∎