Kena: Scars of Kosmora reveals story and companion for 2027 launch

🍃 A mature return to Ember Lab’s spirit world

When independent studio Ember Lab released Kena: Bridge of Spirits in 2021, it arrived as a minor miracle. Founded by brothers Mike and Josh Grier as a boutique digital animation house, the studio managed to produce an action-adventure that looked indistinguishable from a high-budget animated feature film. Yet beneath its adorable Rot spirits and lush forest canopies lay a surprisingly demanding, tight combat engine with parry timings that caught casual players completely off guard.

Following its February reveal, Ember Lab’s Thomas Varga and Josh Grier took to the official PlayStation Blog with a closer look at the sequel, Kena: Scars of Kosmora, and a new release window.

The headline is the delay: the game has moved from 2026 to 2027, on PlayStation 5 and PC, with no exact date yet. In Ember Lab’s words, the extra time lets the team “really polish the expanded game experience” it wants to deliver. The studio calls the sequel a character-focused linear adventure with a broader scope than Bridge of Spirits, with more to find for players who leave the main path.

For parents who love narrative action games that double as a visual spectacle for the whole living room, the new details about Kosmora’s living cultures, its Alchemystic Temples and Kena’s crystalline companion make the wait easier to accept.

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🐕 A crystalline companion: mount, combat ally and puzzle partner

The most striking addition in Scars of Kosmora is Kena’s new companion, a crystalline canine tied to the island’s origin. Ember Lab describes three jobs for it:

Role	What Ember Lab has said
Mount	It can carry Kena across Kosmora
Combat	It fights alongside her, both while she rides and when she is on foot
Puzzles	It helps solve the Alchemystic puzzles in the temples

In the first game, Kena’s companions were the Rot, the tiny spirits she directed to move objects and distract enemies. A companion she can ride and fight beside is a different kind of bond, and for children watching from the couch, a loyal four-legged partner is an easy character to love. How mounted combat feels in the hand, and how much it changes the parry-heavy fighting of the original, is something nobody outside Ember Lab knows yet. Whatever it turns out to be, the DualSense controller is where it will be felt.

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🏛️ Alchemystic Temples: Proper dungeons at last

One fair criticism of Bridge of Spirits was that its puzzles rarely went beyond the same handful of tricks, however gorgeous the forest around them.

The sequel’s answer is structure. According to the blog post, Kosmora’s ancient Spirit Guides organized their societies around four elements and built Alchemystic Temples. A mysterious cataclysm destroyed one of those cultures, and elsewhere the knowledge of the elements has faded.

The temples are Ember Lab’s dungeons: challenge spaces with transformative rewards that drive Kena’s adventure forward. That is the shape of a classic The Legend of Zelda dungeon, where finishing one changes what you can do in the world outside, and it is the right instinct for a game whose first outing sometimes felt like a beautiful corridor.

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🩹 Healing her own wounds: A mature narrative arc

Narratively, Scars of Kosmora takes a daring and emotionally resonant step forward.

In her debut journey, Kena functioned almost exclusively as an external therapist for the departed. She listened to the tragedies of fallen woodsmiths, mourning hunters, and corrupted village elders, guiding their lingering spirits peacefully into the afterlife while keeping her own inner turmoil locked behind a professional smile.

The sequel flips that dynamic on its head:

“Despite her progress, Kena begins to see her own limitations. She has helped spirits of the dead, but has not yet discovered what Spirit Guides can do for the living. And while she has always helped others confront their suffering, she has barely acknowledged her own…”
— Thomas Varga, Game Writer at Ember Lab

Her childhood friend Orfio believes Kosmora may hold answers for both of them, so Kena travels there to understand where her calling comes from. Kosmora is no ghost town either: the island has several living cultures, each with its own history and struggles.

For parents playing alongside older children, this thematic shift offers rich conversational depth. It explores the universal truth that caregivers and leaders often burn out by carrying the emotional weight of everyone around them while neglecting their own recovery.

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🎮 Catching up: The first game is the best way to wait

If your family has not played Kena: Bridge of Spirits, 2027 leaves plenty of time to fix that, and the sequel will mean more if you know where Kena started.

• Where to play it: the first game came out in September 2021 on PS5, PS4 and PC via the Epic Games Store, and reached Steam in September 2022.
• What it added since: the free Anniversary Update in September 2022 brought New Game+, new outfits and the Spirit Guide Trials challenge mode, so a first playthrough today is the most complete version.
• Who it is for: the ESRB rates it T for Teen. The look is gentle, the fights are not, so the classic setup is a parent on the controller and younger kids on the couch helping to find the Rot.

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🛋️ The living room balance: Feature-film looks, demanding combat

One of the defining traits of Ember Lab’s work is how well it plays as a couch spectator experience:

• For the kids watching: the first game’s character animation and its Balinese gamelan-inspired score already looked and sounded like a feature film running in real time, and everything shown of the sequel continues in that direction.
• For the parent playing: Bridge of Spirits demanded precise parries, dodges and target priority, and its boss fights were genuinely hard. Expect the same, and keep that in mind before handing the controller to a younger player.

Ember Lab has not said anything about performance modes or enhancements for the PlayStation 5 Pro yet, so treat any frame-rate promise you read elsewhere as speculation until the studio confirms it.

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⚖️ How the preview stacks up

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🔗 Related reading

• Read our in-depth PlayStation 5 console review for dual-chamber cooling, SSD speeds, and hardware performance.
• Check our mobile gaming impressions in our PlayStation Portal remote player review.
• Catch up on Sony’s complete upcoming slate in our PlayStation State of Play recap.
• Plan your travel setup with our PlayStation Portal and Switch 2 travel guide.

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❓ FAQ

When will Kena: Scars of Kosmora release?

Ember Lab has confirmed a 2027 release, physical and digital on PlayStation 5 and digital on PC. There is no exact date yet.

Is Kena: Scars of Kosmora an open-world game?

No. Ember Lab has confirmed it remains a narrative-driven, linear action-adventure like Bridge of Spirits, but featuring significantly larger explorable zones, optional side paths, and dungeon-like temples.

What does the new companion do in Scars of Kosmora?

Kena’s crystalline canine companion can carry her, fights alongside her both mounted and on foot, and helps solve the Alchemystic puzzles in the temples. Ember Lab ties it to the origin of the island.