Kona Reviews

Detective Carl Faubert spends most of his days investigating unfaithful husbands and minor disturbances, so when a rich industrialist asks him to uncover the source of vandalism at his mines, he agrees readily. However, an unexpected crash results in him awakening to find the Northern Canadian forest covered in a sudden and drastic frost storm. Upon finding his client dead in the empty town, Carl must fight against the harsh blizzard and the dangers hidden within it as he seeks to uncover the truth behind the dark history of Lake Atamipek. KONA is a detective survival game, where you investigate a deserted Canadian village where modern civilization and historical folk life meet in a tentative and hesitant clash of ideas. Travel through a land with a history far older than the village upon its land. The village manages to feel appropriately sized, not too close that the wilderness feels non-existent but not tediously distant. Each location also feels realistic, with houses feeling lived-in. Just exceptional atmosphere. One of my favorite things was the multiple realistic instances of key items. If you need a hammer to proceed, you don't need to find the single hammer in the entire village, but simply need to find a garage or a workshop. There are a few gripes - The investigating. There is little deduction for you to actively do. Your journal is filled as you progress and collect documents. Some of the entries are a little too terse and disconnected from the previous entries, and despite being given a camera, it feels underused in the journal. - The radio station. While each major location has its own distinct atmospheric music (awesome), the radios scattered in the houses and your truck seem to play five or six 30 second bits. - The documents tab. Your document inventory is on a dial, and sorted by the order you pick up them, resulting in ending the game with ~45 documents squished onto a single wheel in a messy order. - The world advancement. After a certain point, the world changes. [spoiler] After the final vision is discovered, the world shifts to night unexpectedly and permanently, making backtracking through the village a little annoying [/spoiler]. Overall, easily a 9/10 walking simulator, 7/10 for a detective game. Great story and atmosphere, wish there was more game interactivity.

I'm really liking Kona so far! The narrator is hilarious at times and I just love the funny comments that you come across while playing. The funny notes about items you inspect is also great. I loved the story of The Long Dark so Kona caught my eye when I saw someone online playing it. I love the mysterious story and being able to search houses and figure things out. If you like searching and a good story, this game may be for you.

Kona is a great game to play during the summer heat—it’ll make you feel nice and cold. The blizzard effects are quite realistic, though they can be a bit frustrating at times, as they significantly reduce visibility. While the atmosphere is immersive, the music could use a bit more variety. It feels like you're always hearing the same tune, no matter whether it's from a record or the radio

actually a good game but they almost ruined the game with some basic things. inventory managament is not practical and too much delay between items. useless vehicles. when i press the shift character won't sprint . i have to press like 4-5 times sometimes 2 and i tried with full health, warm and sanity but still same. that was very annoying. i almost forgot. that narrator was testing my patience. he s keep talking even when you find a document! i'm trying to read the document but narrator keep intervening. but overall i liked so my review is positive.

This game is worth playing if you love rural detective tales with a constant narrator. Despite a few weak elements, including the ending, the overall experience was deeply immersive. The vibe is perfect for the winter. I'll start with the strong elements: The detective fiction and visual storytelling aspects are excellent. It holds your hand a lot more than e.g. Painscreek, including such features as a journal which automatically updates with important details and conclusions and a narrator which often gives you a good idea of what you need to be doing and if you have fully revealed the clues in a crucial area. You spend a lot of time out in the snowy wilderness, so the game throws you a bone by giving you the occasional animal prints to follow which usually lead you to a nearby point of interest such a campfire or trash pile. Despite all this, it feels like it gives you some space to solve the clues at hand from letters, object placement, etc. I'm reading some complaints about the narrator, but I found him enjoyable, like Carl (the protagonist) is trying to keep himself in high spirits while isolated in a blizzard. When you take the hard boiled detective outside of the gritty cityscape, maybe he lightens up a bit, gets into the spirit of the place, like Dale Cooper. The rural Canadian wilderness is gorgeous, sparse, and lonely. Your narrator is your only regular companion. Has that Painscreek/Dark Souls/Bioshock feel of a town that has just recently undergone a minor apocalypse, or perhaps rapture. While I'm on the topic of comparing the vibe to other games, you may get a whiff of Remedy's Alan Wake (not quite Twin Peaks, maybe from lack of characters) and Control (okay this is specifically because of the location cards and their sound effect). There are some aggressive wolves from time to time, and the game offers you a nonviolent solution in the form of steaks if you feel bad about shooting innocent wild beasts who don't know any better. Considering how many times I've followed their tracks to find my way, it feels like there's a kind of kinship which makes shooting them feel unnecessarily cruel. I mean, what do you expect to be at the end of a set of wolf tracks? Not their fault you followed! Now for the weaker elements: The music is pretty good, and the only reason it's here in the "weaker" section is because there is simply not enough of it. There's like three tracks that repeat, either on the radio or as part of the background music. Would have been nice if different radios were tuned to different stations to give you a bigger variety. Fortunately, most of the time is spent listening to the soothing sounds of wind and snowfall. A minor quibble I had was that there is a set of objects in the game which, when approached, cause a high pitched noise and visual distortion to appear. Given the psyche meter and my experience with other horror games with a Sanity function (Amnesia: Dark Descent, Eternal Darkness, etc), I had assumed this was an indicator to stay away and avoid looking directly at it. In fact, the game wants you to do the exact opposite: Go straight up to the thing and look as closely as you can! Despite the frequent references to caribou, including what is apparently a kind of French Canadian alcohol mixture, you never actually see a single caribou, or really any other animal except wolves. You hear plenty of creatures in the trees and bushes, but nothing ever appears. Somewhat understandable given you're out in a blizzard, but I would think at least a caribou or two would not go amiss, considering there are wolves about and they probably eat something besides the contents of the village's trash cans. The "survival horror" aspect of the game feels like a system put in place for gameplay that never occurs. I don't know if there was a greater variety of NPC types planned, but ultimately you end up with far more materials than are ever necessary. If you load up your truck with logs and are pretty diligent with exploration, you will likely end up with far more matches, firestarters, and other materials than you could ever hope to use by the conclusion of the game. Between ammo and steaks, you are unlikely to find a need to resort to any of the melee options. Go ahead and stow that heavy axe away. You probably won't need most of those first aid kits either. Cigarettes are mildly useful to a point, but your psyche meter drains at roughly the same rate as your heat and recovers as you get warm, though only up to like 60-70%. Keeping it topped off beyond that is usually unnecessary as it will almost immediately drain again once you step outside and only seems to affect how long you can sprint, which isn't very long even at max. It affects your aim slightly, but nothing is fast enough for this to matter and you can comfortably use your ironsights with time to spare. Heat is the only thing you actually need to manage, but there are ample heat sources in every house and cabin, with campfires dotting the wilderness for your convenience. Now the actual negatives: The weakest element by far in this game is the appearance of the supernatural. This begins to appear quite early, immediately outside the General Store where you begin the game proper (after what can be thought of as the tutorial and intro). **What follows may be considered //Spoilers//, though I will avoid any particular revelations about the case and the ending as best as I can.** Initially, the supernatural elements appear as a kind of secondary case, and if this had continued this way, it would been a fine addition to flesh out the lore of the region. Unfortunately, this supernatural element quickly overtakes the central mystery case as the dominant plot. Your character has a variety of "visions" which can reveal anything from a clue to entire events in the recent past, which feel a bit like they are undercutting the game's own detective element. Rather than solve the clues and find the solution, you watch the vision reveal secrets. Sometimes you will end up in impossible places and even the normally loquacious narrator doesn't bother to comment on this fact. It's unclear if your character has a particular "power" or if this is a more or less universal experience from encountering this mystical thing, as only one note mentions having had similar visions. Ambiguity isn't an issue, especially when it comes to mystic visions, but the problem I have is that these visions are, themselves, a "solution" to certain "puzzles". By the last leg of the game, the murder mystery is resolved as almost a second thought through - you guessed it! - a vision, making your ultimate destination on the map quite moot. This is seemingly where a lot of people's complaints are coming from in the negative reviews, so I will end with why I still think it's worth playing despite this. The game's ending is a fairly quick linear sequence with almost no way to get lost off the beaten track and zero puzzles whatsoever to solve. It feels simultaneously like an afterthought and as a way to get an exciting "epic" ending out of an otherwise slow-paced game, like it's a reward for making it to the end. By the time you get to this point, though, you have probably experienced the vast majority of the game and, hopefully, enjoyed that time up to this point like I did. In my opinion, too much emphasis is placed on "endings" as making or breaking the enjoyment of a game, show, etc, but I argue that some of the greatest works had either weak endings or none at all. Consider Firefly, Lodge 49, Rome, or any other show that was cut down before its time. Consider anime like Kemonozume which are essentially perfect right up until the director seemingly does not quite know how to end it. I urge you to not let this small element of disappointment negatively color the greater enjoyment you just had.

This game is a surprisingly cozy game. I expected more horror and dark elements. It's mainly just an exploration game with a few stories to explore about the various characters. I didn't play the story in the right order, which made it a bit confusing. If you really enjoy following the mystery of a game like this, definitely follow a non-spoiler guide that will keep you pointing in the right direction. I'm sure others have said in their reviews, but the controls can be a bit clunky. Driving is pure misery. But once you get a coat you can walk pretty much anywhere. The ending was abrupt and frustrating and I did look up a guide to tell me where I was supposed to go and how, but that was a tiny part of the whole experience of the game. Despite some little complaints, the game is fun and chill. Very atmospheric, great music, lots of mysteries to explore. Definitely recommend.

Really good mystery horror. Short and impactful with fantastic atmosphere. Pretty good payoff but the horror aspect is a little shallow so don't go in expecting a full on horror.

Achievements are not working :-( finished game in 3 hours and nothing.

[h3]A walking simulator that goes nowhere.[/h3] Kona is an often recommended title for fans who played Firewatch and The Painscreek Killings. Unlike those titles, however, I could not tolerate more than 4 hours of Kona. It starts off fine enough. You're a private investigator meeting a client, when your client is found dead. You're then left wondering who in town is the murderer as you methodically visit each residence while everyone's mysteriously vanished. This is reminiscent of Painkscreek Killings, where you'll have a foreboding feeling you're being watched as you traverse hours on-foot and on rare occasions by car. So what does it get wrong? First, the lonely isolation is ruined by an annoying narrator who sounds like they're from the Stanley Parable. This narrator often cracks jokes, making light of situations. Even during a jump scare moment when the lights go out, the narrator feels a need to comment. In games like this, things are better left unsaid. Sometimes not even the game knows whether it wants to use the narrator; inspected objects may instead overlay text on in-game geometry, leaving the player confused whether the narrator broke or whether they need to look around for floating text. Another issue plaguing users is a visual performance bug impacting frame-rates when the player strafes left and right. I'm reviewing this on a good desktop rig with a RTX 4090, Intel i7-10700k OC'ed @ 4ghz, and 64GB RAM yet despite the fps at 350+ the fps hitches when strafing. Using V-Sync and other graphic options didn't fix this. Multiple users on Steam have reported the issue, yet the issue remains unfixed. This is absurd for a game primarily about navigation. Speaking of navigation, your character can't sprint long distances. Okay, fine, but there's also no stamina meter. I'm beginning to think this game hates me. Good news though! There's a survival system in this game! Bad news, it's just a marketing ploy. The survival elements hardly matter. Just light a fire when you need to get warm, smoke a cigarette for your sanity, take a medkit when hurt, done. Basically, when outdoors, treat the game like a mini speed-run and you'll do fine. Just don't light every fire you come across, or you can't complete the game due to a lack of fire matches! Too bad the inventory management is also convoluted and messy. It over-utilizes a radial wheel menu for everything, made awkward by the game having a weight limit to inventory, and simply annoying when navigating tons of documents. An absolute mess of a game. Kona doesn't treat the player's time with respect, the narrator is unnecessary, the interface is confusing, and the survival mechanics are hollow. At least it has me excited to play Kona II because now I need to know if the developers learned from their mistakes. [b]Final score: 3 out of 10[/b]

I bought Kona on sale at a deep discount so hate to leave a thumbs down review. I wish Steam offered an "ambivalent" option for cases where players have no strong feelings either way. I liked the setting, graphics, and general quality of this game. The "feel" of trekking in Canada in the winter was achieved well. Unfortunately, almost every minute of gameplay for me was spent in frustration of handling tedious actions that should have never even been a significant part of gameplay. This game was a missed opportunity. I wish the developers had spent a little time getting some feedback on their UI choices and gameplay mechanics, as well as the main script. Complaints: The inventory interface is not good. Using a wheel of choices doesn't work when you get beyond 8 or so items. There's no good description for what the item even is, other than a tiny icon, and item selection is extremely difficult when using a controller. Driving a vehicle shouldn't be so hard. The acceleration is either 100% or 0. You spend most of your time traveling between locations in an annoying jilted manner, constantly hitting the breaks and running off road and into trees. Honestly, this game would be better implemented without vehicles at all. Searching through houses is too tedious. You spend half of your search time opening and closing drawers that 90% of the time are completely empty. Cabinets and drawers should be eliminated from this game as well. The few "gopher quests" in this game are very disappointing. You build up an inventory of numerous items only to find out you don't ever use most of them. And when you need to combine items for a specific "puzzle" it's inscrutable what items you need, and inexplicable as to why you can't use better suited items in their place. You will have to do an internet search for a cheat/walkthrough to figure out how & where to find the few keys items required. I don't enjoy games that are so inscrutable you feel the need to turn to online help in order to progress. This is unfortunately extremely true for the final boss battle. I also wasn't a fan of the 3rd person narration throughout the game. It was tolerable, and something different from the norm, so it wasn't horrible; but the concept could've been improved upon in any number of ways. Lastly, the main storyline was fine for a weak videogame, but the end resolution was extremely disappointing given the buildup to it. There is no "detective" aspect to this game, you're simply led linearly down a storytelling. You have no chance to guess what the mystery is. Only at the end is it all displayed for you in one big cutscene. You have no control over the outcome, and no ability to deduce anything during play. This game is more of a tedious, passive walkthrough of a weak "campfire ghost story". I will not be playing Kona 2 given its description. It's too bad; the game engine and presentation showed promise, but simply failed to deliver any fun. Completing this game was a frustrating exercise in tedium for me. I enjoyed playing Firewatch, and The Fidelio Incident, but was mistaken in thinking Kona would be similar in any meaningful way.