Mork told me that Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess was supposed to be some kind of sleeper hit, that's what he'd read around and also literally seen on Steam - the very definition of a tough crowd. But he also could not figure out what was going on in it - not that the gameplay wasn't clear, but because all the trappings underneath it had no reference to anything he understood. I grabbed the demo, played through it, and saw that it referred to itself as a Kagura Action Strategy Game. I knew the last three words, but the first one stood out. You don't need to understand what Kagura is in order to play the game, which is pretty cool and is essentially derived from tower defense and features dancy combat. But if you want to know what's happening, which I suspect would be absolutely clear to any Japanese person? You might want to know that Kagura means something like "entertaining the gods."

I'd seen a trailer for it, back when all the trailers were coming out, and I had absolutely no means of processing it. Some games don't trailer well, some games you gotta play, which is why I was glad to have that demo. If you're doing something super weird and you're published by Devolver, that is the marketing. If you're doing something weird and you're Capcom, and the "weird" thing you're doing is codifying an ancient religious ritual into videogame form, the lift might be a little heavier.

Imagine how differently our cultural referents would hit if at some point much earlier in the formation of our national identity, Ghostbusters came out - and it wasn't a comedy. It was a drama. Imagine if busting didn't merely make one feel good, but was an essential means of accessing and entreating the divine. Like Okami, Kunitsu-Gami is a game or whatever but also a really interesting window into something fundamentally Japanese. I think I might have to grab the full version.

Here around 10:30am PT, I'll fire up the stream to play Kunitsu-Gami and a few more demos you might tap into over the weekend. See you then!

(CW)TB out.