Driving through a snowstorm in a ghost town is a good idea, right?
Set in remote Northern Canada, a lovely little region by the name of Atamipek Lake, you play as Carlos, a private detective, and have set out to make contact with a new client, only to find the entire town deserted. Don’t expect to spend this time alone taking in the sights however, as a turn in the weather has you walking blindly through a blizzard.
Treading the same beaten path as games like Gone Home and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Kona aims to immerse the player into a vacant world through its environments. The scenes lend themselves to telling a story all their own. An ominous soundtrack and the unsettling feeling that the town is not as empty as it appears is quite compelling. Unfortunately there are so many snags that trip up the experience it wasn’t long before I surrendered myself to the face full of snow and bruised shins.
Having such a high emphasis on narrative, it is surprising that the voice work and writing are so stilted and uninspiring. Following clicking on an item, more often than not you get a spurt of dialogue from the ethereal voice in your head. Not only is this grizzled old man’s voice so robotic in tone I genuinely pondered whether they used text-to-speech software, but the writing is a disjointed mess. All too often you come across lines like “If the blankets suggested people woke up precipitously, Carl saw evidence of a disorderly escape. So what was it?” Not only is that an opaque and overly indulgent mouthful, the weird use of tense and third person is awkward. At points the voice is pointing out things were so different in the past and at others he is describing Carl’s thoughts in real time.
Kona touts itself as a blend of adventure and survival genres, but again we have a small dollop of interaction jam spread over a large slice of dry walking simulator toast. Puzzles consist of finding the right items to craft into the solution. The problem being that all the crafting is done for you, and you are given a recipe of ingredients needed to solve said “puzzle”. The game then turns into a hidden object game. Looking in every cupboard, opening every drawer until you find all the things in order to fix the other thing. Annoyingly, items only have symbols in the recipe. At one point I had a “pincer” that could open a locked gate, but didn’t have a “pliers” to fix a generator; both have the same symbol and with no other distinction it was quite confusing. This contradiction of the game’s own rules is frustrating and sloppy design.
There is an element of supernatural present, and again similarities can be drawn to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, as ghostly memories of characters play out portions of their story in a haze of dream-like color and blur. This leads to some of the more interesting puzzles and also feeds into the mystery of the town, which is the strongest draw Kona has at this point in time.
You spend a great deal of time driving your car between homes, squinting through snow with only about 5 feet of visibility. My thoughts are this lack of vision is to help with performance, but in my case it certainly didn’t help. A single car trip was filled with so many frame drops and stutters that I would undoubtedly crash at least a couple times. I have a decent rig, so this is definitely an area that needs work in Early Access.
Of course, like most crowdfunded indie game these days, it comes with its own shoe-horned in survival system. You have meters for health, temperature, stress and weight. Staying out in the cold reduces your temperature (duh) and there are health packs around to heal you. By and large I ignored all of it, as it had no impact during my time playing. I hope with the full release of the game (as we only have access to about 30%) there will be more use of the survival mechanics, forcing time constraints onto these puzzles.
The complete whiteout is definitely foreboding, and the emptiness is effective at sending a chill up your spine (no pun intended). There is artistry in the environments, as they can be simultaneously unsettling and beautiful. However, prevalent issues across all aspects of the game (puzzle design; movement; writing; voice acting; performance) left me walking away with a bad taste in my mouth, maybe it was all those steaks I kept stealing from everyone’s fridge.
