Kona review: An impressive detective game suffering from an identity crisis

Kona is a detective game set in Canada in the 1970’s, that sees you play as private investigator Carl Faubert, who arrives at a snowy, sleepy town in Northern Quebec on the order of his client, only to find the place practically deserted, and with something sinister afoot.

Narratively, the game is part Fargo, part Twin Peaks, written with a sly glance over Raymond Chandler’s shoulder. Carl occasionally has his thoughts narrated as he sifts through clues to find out what has happened to the town and its inhabitants, and it’s one of the few voices you’ll hear in the game.

Kona excellently captures a sense of isolation and the eerie dread that comes with it. You learn early on that all is not well in the town, and while you’re provided with a map to find your way (which you have to actually open and refer to each time, no onscreen arrows here), there’s wilderness in every direction. Go off the beaten path, especially in the dark with just your torch to find your way, and you’ll soon want to turn around and head straight back to the main road again. While the graphics aren’t spectacular, the world that Kona creates, from its abandoned houses to its daunting forests, is incredibly effective and believable.

While there’s no doubt that the town is immersive - and the locale and story pull you in - what dumps you straight back into your own living room on a regular basis is the loading screens (at least on the PS4). The game is presented as an open world, but even just crossing the street can make everything stop suddenly, while the game buffers and a loading icon swirls in the middle of the screen. It’s like watching Netflix on a really bad connection. These moments happen often and can last up to fifteen seconds a time, wiping away all that carefully constructed world building.

The game places a large emphasis on its ‘survival’ gameplay, perhaps in an attempt to differentiate itself from other similar games. It’s true that the Canadian wilderness is the real nemesis in the game, or at least it is early on. Spend more time outside, and your body temperature will drop, forcing you to find a fire to warm yourself up at. I actually died from exposure in the first 15 minutes of the game, as I tested how long you could stay out in the snow (not long, as it turned out).

The problem is that once you’ve seen through this mechanic, it loses its threat. Firstly, campfires are everywhere in the game, and the objects you need to start a fire are never in short supply. I finished the game with so many firelighters in my pockets it’s a miracle I could still walk. Also, you later find an item of clothing which drastically reduces your exposure to the cold, rendering the threat of the harsh Canadian winter to practically nothing.

You’ll pick up a lot of items in this game, and while your own storage space is limited, you can dump items into the back of your vehicle, which is rarely more than a few feet away from you, again removing any sense of item scarcity.

Kona experiences something of an identity crisis in its gameplay. It lacks the puzzles and encounters of a traditional adventure game (they are there, but neither challenging or numerous) and it gives the player much more freedom and interaction than a traditional ‘walking simulator’, such as Gone Home or Firewatch. This second aspect isn’t a huge issue - so-called walking sims have been criticized regularly for being nothing more than a stroll through vacant worlds where the narrative is rich but there’s little to do - so for a game to actually trust the player with an element of freedom to discover the story themselves is refreshing,

The problem is that Kona doesn’t really go far enough. What few puzzles you find are by the numbers video game problems - cracking a code on a safe, reaching an inaccessible key with an item, or rerouting electricity to open a door. The game is rich with exposition and world building, and falling back on these rather trad style puzzles seems like a wasted opportunity. For a private detective, you don’t get to do much detecting, either.

I came away from my time with Kona both impressed and frustrated in equal measure. The story kept me hooked until its conclusion, and the amount of freedom I was afforded was novel for a game in this genre, but there were too many ‘video game’ moments that took me out of the experience (both technical and mechanical). The developers say that this is just the first installment of a four-part story (even though Kona itself feels self-contained), so there’s a chance that the sequels will benefit from more polish than this first attempt.