As a charming sandbox adventure inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Kaku: Ancient Seal offers both a promise of potential and concern. While sandboxes done right are joyous experiences, there are many design pitfalls, as so much can go wrong. Has the mystical world of Kaku: Ancient Seal managed to avoid these design traps?
Starting a new sandbox title always feels like a lottery, especially when developed by a smaller studio like Bingobell. It doesn’t take much to become more of a nuisance than a pleasure to explore. Annoying durability systems, big empty worlds, and poor enemy scaling are some of the more common and painful issues that a player can experience in their journeys.
Thankfully, the first ten minutes of Kaku: Ancient Seal alleviate the worry for two of these fears; there is nothing like gear durability, and the world feels rich with content wherever is traversed. The game stands out by ensuring that every area—whether an interesting mountain or an alluring cave—offers meaningful interactivity, rewarding players with discoveries, loot, or challenges that encourage constant exploration.
These experiences set Kaku: Ancient Seal apart. Not only are there always interesting places to explore, but the gear feels impactful as well. A major reason for this is that all gear obtained follows a horizontal progression system. Every piece of loot has a unique ability that fits different playstyles and situations. In addition, there are gems that can be socketed into each piece of gear. The result is a system that makes each piece of gear feel interesting—and more impressively, it makes later gear feel more exciting, as there are more pieces to mix and match.
This system ensures that new loot is not just a numerical upgrade, but a new puzzle piece. It makes each treasure chest feel like it might contain a game-changing tool. This is simply great gear design, as it rewards exploration in quite creative ways.
Pure numerical upgrades are separated by the gear and instead obtained in two ways. The first is by finding different keys to enter underground ruins, where health and stamina upgrades can be found. This system feels uninspired, being nearly a straight-up copy of the shrines from Breath of the Wild. Even the dungeon structure feels painfully similar, with some mini-puzzles or combat challenges that have to be solved to get the reward. The one thing that Kaku: Ancient Seal can get some credit for in this system, though, is that said underground ruins can always be accessed with a simple button press, taking away the immediate need to solve the mini-dungeon just because it was discovered.
This is a fantastic design choice. The player is not forced to stop what they are doing to solve puzzles immediately. Rather, it can be done whenever they feel like taking a break from exploring the world. It adds a sweet sense of control over how the game is experienced.
The system for adding attack and armour is far more interesting, though. Specific kinds of jewels that are spread around the world map must be collected. These are not finite resources; they are respawning nodes. This ensures that even when lost, backtracking, or just running around to take in the view, it can be trusted that the path is paved with rewards.
This mixed reward system is marvellous, providing a strong incentive to explore the world on many levels. However, here we come to the last big pitfall: enemy progression. The issue is, like with so many other sandbox games, that while the hero keeps gaining power in seemingly exponential degrees, the enemies never get stronger. Kaku: Ancient Seal has an early-game hell, but an endgame that feels like a walk in the park because of it. While it has a difficulty level, even at the highest difficulty setting, the game stops offering a challenge halfway through the first world that is chosen to be explored, with the first boss faced off against being the last actual challenge in the game.
This is a problem as while the boss fights are quite well designed, that is not shown when almost every boss fight can be handled by spamming the whirlwind attack. The very first boss is a true pleasure to fight, as it requires learning its mechanics. Later on, though, there is really no reason to care about what the boss does outside of a few killing moves. This is a pitfall most sandboxes fall into, and sadly, Kaku: Ancient Seal does it big time.
Another far too common problem is that the game is painfully inconsistent with where can and can’t be travelled to. The big selling point of sandboxes is the freedom they provide. Sadly, Kaku: Ancient Seal diminishes this by erecting odd, invisible walls with inconsistent rules for where they are placed.
There is one particular area of the game that takes this to the next level: the swamp. Here, Kaku is expected to jump from mushroom to mushroom—a task that should be a challenge, yet is still quite manageable, especially as Ancient Seal has a wonderfully designed system for these long jumps, which shows where the hero is expected to land. Alas, this area is filled with devious invisible walls, sending Kaku straight into the toxic swamp water, and back five to ten minutes of progress through the mazelike swamp. To add insult to injury, travelling through this maze of invisible walls is part of the main story.
Few things are as frustrating as finding a clever solution to a puzzle, only to have the game say “Nope” and instantly kill the player for daring to try a solution other than the one the good developer intended. This area epitomises this depressing design—and why? To avoid a shortcut? Kaku: Ancient Seal has so many event flags that it is almost impossible to do any serious sequence breaks in the first place. Why not just let the player be rewarded for finding another route rather than killing them?
This isn’t helped by the fact that some of the more out-there collectibles require odder jumps than anything these invisible walls would prevent. It feels insulting to have to make a very narrow jump to reach a reward that, just half an hour ago, resulted in death by invisible wall. It forces the player to second-guess everything that looks slightly off-road, which is quite a nasty feeling to have lingering in an open-world game and ruins the exploration.
It doesn’t help that said exploration is the game’s main driver. While Kaku: Ancient Seal has a main story, its writing is very barebones. While it is normal in the genre to have a nearly non-existent story, the one here manages to be both too little and overstay its welcome at the same time. The characters Kaku encounters throughout his journey are one-dimensional and unmemorable. This is a problem, as despite that, they have a lot of dialogue. However, said dialogue is nothing more than exposition to explain why he has to travel to 100 different points across the map before reaching his destination. It also contributes to the stakes feeling low, because the only impact seen of any bad guys in the story is that they sometimes capture that continent’s main NPC, of whom the player is given very little reason to care about.
It feels a bit of a bummer when a pure MacGuffin hunt would be preferable over the story delivered, but that is sadly what happens here—and that is, sadly, a common theme in this game. Besides the few genius parts and the straight-up annoyances, nothing stands out. The world design, while full of entertaining distractions, feels awfully stale. There are no true landmarks to make the journey more visually appealing or to help with navigation. While nothing is bad looking, the environment sometimes feels a bit soulless and unnaturally designed.
Kaku: Ancient Seal avoids many genre pitfalls and has clever design choices. However, it sometimes fails to ensure that basic aspects, such as traversing the map, are enjoyable. While it has moments of genius, it also fails miserably at times—and between those times, it just feels stale and mediocre.
Sadly, Kaku: Ancient Seal proves the point made earlier: sandboxes are not easy to get right. For its size and experience, Bingobell did a great job—but for sandboxes, doing a great job doesn’t cut it. It is not enough to make a textbook-good game. However, the clever design choices throughout make this a fun game that leaves a strong sense of curiosity about the studio’s future after the credits roll.
