Your intrepid heroes travel to Canada, find a crowbar, and take a picture. Kona faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Kona
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/365160/
Devel: Parabole
Engine: Unity
Price: 19.99 / CDN 21.99
Wazzat: Northern Canada, 1970. A strange blizzard ravages Atamipek Lake. Step into the shoes of a detective to explore the eerie village, investigate surreal events, and battle the elements to survive. Kona is a chilly, narrative-driven interactive tale you won’t soon forget.
Disclosure: The devs sent us keys
Screenshots:
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
Venn-
- The loading system while driving can fuck right off.
- And get this, it use to not be a thing until they nerfed the game for consoles.
- Using about 45% of the 980.
- I’m sick and tired of developers farting out Unity ports without giving them the TLC needed to run at an acceptable framerate on Linux.
- It can be done but you lot chose not to do it.
Jordan-
- Dat loading scream
Pedro-
- Gah! Those loading screens…
- Still and since this is a Unity game, having the choice between a wide open area with shit performance or a segmented area with passable performance, I’ll take the latter.
- However, changing resolution doesn’t seem to stick.
- I was going to forgive the loading screens, but when you compound that with an old Unity bug where the resolution will keep reverting to 960×540 if I didn’t pick 1080p before applying the settings… Yeah! You’re getting dinged a chair.
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Shiny / Sounds
Venn-
- Staticky film grain effect, the game.
- Outside of that it looks alright for an indie title.
- Then again it should since it’s all trees and snow.
- The one “alive” human character was unintentionally horrifying.
- Lets just say animation rigging is not this studios strong suit.
- Feet! You have feet! #bonussoda
- Graphically it’s well done for what it is.
- Hell, in a strange way some of the jank helps get you into that 70’s Canadian mindset.
- I took off my headphones after about 30 minutes since the narrator bored me and provided useless information.
Jordan-
- I like our narrator’s buttery smooth, Peter Cullen ass voice
- I can dig the 70’s rustic aesthetic, and it works with the film grain effect
- The scenery is just so…racist.
- The soundtrack smacks of the Twin Peaks, Stranger Things tropes, but it’s good for the mood
Pedro-
- Outside of the thing at the end when your character does a thing while another thing tries to do a thing you don’t want any part of… It actually does look alright.
- But what really shines here is the background noise.
- Not the music! That got muted since it managed to take away any form of suspense from certain situations which would have benefited greatly from a little bit of tension.
- My PSA for the devs: Learn how to music!
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Control
Venn-
- WASD plus gerbil, no complaints.
- Xclone Controlla worked but that shite don’t fly for First Person.
Jordan-
Pedro-
- A Unity game with a sensitivity slider which actually works is always good to see.
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FUN
Venn-
- This game starts out with LIES!
- You are trying to tell me a Canadian would be traveling about in FK all nowhere without winter gear at the ready?
- Canadians don’t take a shite without having a heavy coat and gloves nearby, son.
- Regardless, you’re stuck in a town and given FK ALL direction… I like that.
- The goal is to keep warm, don’t get stressed and spool your kleptomania drive while trying to figure out what’s going on.
- BTW
- What’s the point of a Cold and Stress meter if Captain Canuck doesn’t need to eat or sleep? Cause he don’t.
- Then again I would properly hate the game if those mechanics were included.
- At the end of the day this is a scavenger hunt with a few puzzles thrown in to keep it out of the walking simulator category.
- And if you can power through the first three hours, the story starts to get wicked interesting.
- Yeah, that’s where I’m at right now.
- If we’re being honest I was going to give this critter 2 Chairs plus an Astro (mainly due to the price) until I discovered something.
- You can kill yourself to death by chain smoking.
- THREE CHAIRS!
Jordan-
- This game’s an interesting comparison to that other one we reviewed, Lifeless Planet
- The games are pretty similar. You’re thrown into a strange hostile environment with little information, things aren’t making sense, but you find clues and other strangeness, go solve some puzzles along the way
- I’d say Kona does that better than lifeless planet
- Plus no stupid bullshit platforming segments
- Had to backtrack a few times because I missed some item I needed for later though, which kinda took me out of the fun as I go over previous areas with a fine tooth comb. That doesn’t really keep me invested
- Still, it’s a good looking, good sounding game, and if you’re into these marathon walkathon/findallthethings type games, you might enjoy it.
- Or if you’re interested in supporting canadian content.
Pedro-
- There’s definitely a mix of genres here.
- And they sorta work.
- This is the game you’d get if you threw Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and The Long Dark into an ice blender.
- From Shattered Memories you get the need to photograph everything and the general atmosphere, from Ethan Carter you get the sense of not knowing what the fuck is going on or where you need to go next as well as the “Detective Sense”, and from The Long Dark you get the setting, survival elements and the wolves being big fat douchebags.
- But when you do turn on that canadian ice blender, ‘eh, all you end up with is a game with a contrived story which leans on the supernatural crutch a bit too much.
- Not saying that’s a bad thing but you need to either set up a story in which that works or you’ll end up with people like me asking: How the fuck does “that person” do “that thing”? And don’t give me any bullshit about the local lore, you shoehorned that in pretty terribly, if you ask me.
- “But Pedro, why are you complaining about the story? Aren’t you the one who says mechanics are the most important thing in a video game?”
- Yes, but all of the mechanics in Kona have been done before and I didn’t exactly enjoy any of the other games which did it, either!
- They’re tolerable at best, as is Kona.
- So I was looking at the story as it being the saving grace for this particular occasion, it was in vain.
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Final –
