Kena: Scars of Kosmora is built around losing what made the first game work

The most significant design decision Ember Lab has made with Kena: Scars of Kosmora is not the larger world, not the new island, not even the expanded elemental systems the studio has built from scratch. It is this: in the first act, Kena’s staff — the tool that allowed her to commune with spirits and kept her alive as a Spirit Guide — is shattered. The sequel begins at the moment of subtraction.

Announced at PlayStation State of Play in February 2026, Scars of Kosmora follows an older Kena, now recognised as an accomplished Spirit Guide, who travels to the island of Kosmora searching for answers to a lifelong affliction. The island, divided into distinct cultural regions with their own histories and buried tragedies, is not somewhere she can simply apply what she already knows. When a local spirit breaks her staff on arrival, the game makes that impossibility literal.

What replaces it is an elemental infusion system. The inhabitants of Kosmora developed their own approach to Spirit Guiding — ancient techniques rooted in alchemy that allow practitioners to manipulate elements directly. Kena learns to channel ice, to freeze opponents in combat, to bond with elemental spirit allies native to the island. Those allies grow stronger as the bond deepens, unlocking new capabilities across exploration and combat. The mechanical foundation — action-RPG melee, companion coordination, spatial awareness — is familiar from Bridge of Spirits. The vocabulary has changed completely.

What Kosmora adds to the system

The island functions as more than setting. Ember Lab describes Kosmora as a world of tightly designed regions with deliberate progression, each carrying traces of its specific cultural past. The idea that Spirit Guiding is not a single universal practice — that different peoples, across different places, found different ways to move between life and death — gives the world room for genuine discovery. A player who finished Bridge of Spirits knowing exactly how Kena works will arrive on Kosmora without that certainty.

Kena’s personal search anchors the narrative. The affliction she has endured all her life remains undefined at this stage — a deliberate gap that keeps the journey from resolving before it begins. She is not visiting Kosmora for professional reasons. She is looking for something the island may have buried in its tragic past.

Ember Lab and the sequel’s structural bet

Bridge of Spirits was released in 2021 as Ember Lab’s debut. It arrived with a visual and cinematic refinement unusual for a studio its size — the Rot, Kena’s small spirit companions, were simultaneously a combat mechanic and a personality that accumulated across the game. The sequel retains some version of those companions but removes them from the centre of the system, replacing them with elemental allies rooted in Kosmora’s specific history.

The game comes to PlayStation 5 and PC in 2026. Ember Lab remains a small independent studio, and the partnership with PlayStation has expanded the scope without transforming the operation. Making the sequel’s central drama about loss — about beginning from reduction — is the kind of structural decision that studios with less confidence in their own design language tend not to take.

Whether Kena’s elemental alchemy can carry what the staff carried, and whether Kosmora earns the weight the premise places on it, will only become clear when the game ships. What is already clear is the argument: the most interesting sequel is not the one that builds on what worked, but the one that asks what the original was actually made of.

Tags: action-adventure, PS5, pc, RPG, Ember Lab, Kena: Scars of Kosmora