Keen – One Girl Army is a neon-bright game with charming visuals and puzzles that are sure to make you take a deep breath, say, “I’ll just try again later” and angrily shove your Switch in your bag. That is to say: I really enjoyed my time with Keen – One Girl Army. It’s from developer Cat Nigiri, who’ve previously been responsible for titles such as Necrosphere and have been developing a variety of games since 2012. It has been published by Phoenixx and was released on Steam before it came to Switch.

You make your way through the game as Kim, a spunky warrior that is well-armed while dashing around the screen on rollerskates. Zombies, robots, and more enemies await your blade, and it seems pretty simple. In theory, it is, but what truly took me pleasantly by surprise was the actual depth of the game.

Combat in itself is a puzzle. The enemies only move when you do, which means you can manipulate their positioning. It is incredibly satisfying when you figure out the right chess-like moves. Get it right, and you clear out swathes of enemies at a time, cleaning up a room in seconds. Equally it means if you make a wrong move you’re likely to end up surrounded, with enemies taking chunks out of your health that can very quickly end in a death. 

There’s no rush or timer on combat situations due to the turn-based nature of them, and you can spend as long as you’d like figuring out the correct moves. Puzzles outside of combat also await you. Long, lavish levels open themselves up, filled with secrets and rewards. I’ll admit that I expected the game to be shallow, and found that it wasn’t. Simple mechanics are simply the pathway to a bigger adventure.

The speed of the game when playing and the level-based nature of it meant that at first I found myself pulling out the game when I wanted to pass small pockets of time. I then would get sucked into the scope of the levels. Some are small or at the least relatively linear, but others are sprawling and become a pocket world unto themselves. There will be rooms that have multiple entrances and exits. There will be a lot of rooms, and multiple ways to get around.

This way, the game encourages a lot of exploration within the levels. Whilst you can certainly slash and slide your way to the level exit as quickly as possible, you’re liable to miss out on vital items that will enable you to get power ups. If you miss out on the ability to get those powerups – achieved by completing trials at hidden temples – then you’re effectively putting the game in hard mode, as I quickly found out.

These levels can be positively labyrinthine, and if you’re not particularly sharp-minded, they can be pretty hard or even unforgiving. It’s fair, but sometimes frustrating. Progress in these winding levels is marked by checkpoints, which sometimes can leave you repeating the same four rooms over and over if you die in the fourth room. The good news is that by the millionth run of the same set of rooms, you can get through them with absolute ease after figuring out the trick. The bad news is that you have to make your millionth run of the rooms.

If you do get frustrated trying to find everything in a level and head for the exit as soon as possible, though, the game is forgiving. Levels are replayable. There’s certain deceptively simple looking targets for each level, too, that encourage going in again and again to see if you can pull it off. Trust me, though: achieving the goals of playing a level without dying, or playing a level in under a certain amount of moves, is a lot harder than it looks.

All of this gameplay is wrapped up in a polished, vibrant art style taking cues from cyberpunk aesthetic. At first, I was slightly overwhelmed by the way it reminded me of iOS and Android games. That’s not a bad thing, not exactly anyway, there are plenty of aesthetically appealing, mechanically sound and interesting mobile games. Simple controls paired with a saturated, thickly lined cartoonish style and bobble-head characters is reminiscent of mobile titles, that’s all.

After thinking about this mobile art style whilst preparing to write this review, I then found out that prior to Necrosphere and Keen – One Girl Army, developer Cat Nigiri had predominantly made games for iOS and Android. It made things click into place in terms of art direction, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that their games are homogenous or boring to look at. They are far from boring. To make a fair statement, Necrosphere, by contrast, looks nothing like a mobile game.

Recognizable codifiers in art aren’t a bad thing, and whilst the toon-like bobble heads aren’t always to my taste, Keen – One Girl Army did win me over. The style matches the game and helps keep the screen from becoming too chaotic or confusing. It’s taken an art style that I find familiar from mobile games and has lifted it up, polished it, and made it right for PC and console. You can zoom right in on screenshots of this game and find it gorgeous and crisp and clean.

That said, I actually think portable platforms are the best for this game anyway. I’m incredibly glad I have this on my Switch. Not having to fully shut down the game if I’m in the middle of a frustrating level segment is pretty much a godsend for me. I can just put my Switch to sleep and come back where I left off later. In fact, I find this far more useful in Keen – One Girl Army than I do in other games.

Both in terms of mechanics and art, the game only fell down a couple of times. I found that sometimes it was hard to tell how far away from me certain enemies were. Enemies that float, glow or both can sometimes trick the eye into seeming like they’re one more square back than they are. Early on in the game, Kim is arrested and sent to a prison that she must promptly escape from. It’s full to the brim of floating robot guards, and I died more than once to thinking they were further away than they really were.

As I’ve mentioned before, the game’s levels are divided up by checkpoints. These are pretty fairly placed, but can be frustrating. As someone who’s bad at video games, I would’ve preferred at least the option for a system that places me back at the start of a room rather than the start of a level or a checkpoint. This could bring difficulty challenges in and of itself. If you enter a challenging room with low health, do you try to battle through or do you start the level over?

Unfortunately, I found the story of Keen – One Girl Army was pretty take it or leave it. There’s a decent amount of story and dialogue, and none of it is boring, but none of it is hugely central to the levels or the gameplay, either. I found myself sometimes button mashing because I wanted to get back to playing the game itself. With this game being a turn-based action puzzle beast, I think it would be kind of difficult to come up with a story that is as exciting as the game itself.

The music is not particularly memorable. Much like my nitpicking about the art style, though, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The music suits the tone and nature of the game, and is never particularly intrusive. In a game that encourages patience and thinking your way through the action, it’s good not to have a soundtrack that is too bombastic. I think often it can be a mistake to assume every song on a game soundtrack should be an out and out banger or a song that provokes something emotional. It’s perfectly acceptable for it just to set the scene and be in the background.

As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t enocuntered anything all that bad about the game. There is nothing criminal, and nothing damning; nothing that makes it not worth playing. The good, by far, outweighs the minor bad. Keen – One Girl Army’s flaws are characterized by largely being dismissable opinions, personal taste, and simple ideas, none of which actually touch the core gameplay. 

The core gameplay rocks, and that is what matters. It’s easy to put the game down when you get frustrated, and is equally easy to pick it back up again to slide and slash your way through your enemies to reach the next step on your journey… Man, I wish I was a cool little girl with roller skates. It really reignites my life-long desire for a pair of heelys. I mean, what? Excuse me. I’m going to go play some more. 

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Keen – One Girl Army was provided by Phoenixx/Cat Nigiri for this review.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Keen - One Girl Army

$15.99

7.9

Score

7.9/10

Pros

• Energetic puzzle action game
• Engaging, sprawling level design

Cons

• Lacklustre story
• Occasionally frustrating checkpointing system