Welcome To Kowloon is an indie first-person horror game that entertains some interesting ideas even if they are not fully realized.
The city of Kowloon is the kind of modern-day mythos that we don’t get that often. Located in the British-controlled Hong Kong, the area was ungoverned, had locked sanitation, and was the most densely packed city in human history. Demolished between 1993 and 1994, it makes sense that the city remains as popular in storytelling as it is, featured in anime like Kowloon Generic Romance, games like Slitterhead, and in films, Crime Story, which was filmed alongside the city’s actual demolition. It was also such a nightmare; it makes sense that horror games like Welcome to Kowloon are drawn to the location as well.
You play an unnamed student who requires affordable housing, no matter the conditions. As such, they managed to secure a place in the fabled walled city. Starting, your character pulls up in a lot right outside the city, appears to abandon your car there in a lot of some kind, then heads inside the densely populated city to find the room you paid for. If you are familiar with the walled city, there is one piece of information that is just sort of given to you that you might miss, or that could make you deeply aware of what the game is building to. It feels like a bad choice to do that, with that better serving as a reveal for later, but I digress.
If there is one thing I can say about Welcome to Kowloon, which is fairly short and beatable within an hour, it is just how claustrophobic it feels. Making your way onto the first streets with stores, you will genuinely feel boxed in. It’s an uncomfortable but accurate feeling comparable to entering Kowloon itself, and this feeling makes for a more compelling monster than the ones you are set to encounter. There, you enter a building, and the feeling of being a sardine grows as you traverse tiny staircases and small hallways.
Unfortunately, a reason this feeling is bolstered is by clunky and janky first-person controls that just aren’t good. Tapping the joystick, and there is a genuine beat of anticipation as you wait to see if your camera moves correctly, further in the wrong direction, or even with framerate dips. Your character seems to have wandering eyes, too, so there is often an effect of moving the camera left, which it does, while the view drifts up, which is frustrating and disorienting. This is, by Welcome to Kowloon‘s own admission, a walking sim first and foremost, which I could live with. Some of my favorite games are in that genre. You just need to get the camera right.
After fighting against these controls for a bit, you finally arrive at your room, which is when all hell breaks loose. Granted, Welcome to Kowloon knows how to at least build anticipation. There are a few straight jump scares, all pretty effective, just because I was like, “Ok, no way something will scare me now if they didn’t then. OH SH…” There is also some disturbing imagery, though why the dead bodies hanging from hooks were so well endowed will remain one of life’s greatest mysteries.
Part of letting my guard down was the annoying doors that never stayed shut. It was cool in part to often just get to push my way through, but they open both ways and down have an anchor point for closed. Unless you have to actively interact with them. This means the door would open almost every single way for no reason. They also never open fully. This creates a constant illusion that you are about to encounter something spooky, but rarely do. It would have been less annoying and more atmospheric if you didn’t have to fight the door and the camera to travel back through.
That is most of the game, too. There are goals with almost every single one requiring you to travel the tight spaces looking for a key, with the occasional puzzle to break up that monotony. The annoying part is that it isn’t until the very end that the player encounters an exploration puzzle, which I would call really great. One that mixes the horror with exploration and has genuine discovery mixed into it. This is sandwiched between a more lackluster puzzle and an anticlimactic ending.
Several of the jump scares went unappreciated by me, too. Not for lack of trying, but because of that damn camera. During that final puzzle, there is a stalker-like creature that pops its head out or is seen in the distance. At least it should be because at two points I was like, “Is something there?” since I saw something out of the corner of my eye, fighting the camera until I could actually look and see nothing there. At one point earlier, it lunges at you, but all I saw were its feet. If you manage to get the full effect of them coming at you, it is superb.
The game is also painfully dark. The title has an epilepsy warning for flashing lights, which I get because those got bad as well, but my holy hell was the game dark. So dark that at points I was running against walls because I could see nothing, literally. You even find a flashlight way later than you should, and it barely helps; it is so ineffective for lighting the halls. It also helps highlight the poor camera motion even further.
Additionally, there is one point in Welcome to Kowloon where you have to flee a chasing enemy. For some reason, the thought was, what if, as you run, your character uses so much energy that he keeps losing his sight? It was a minute-long moment in the game. I needed to replay three times because I couldn’t see a thing. This isn’t the only time the game chooses the worst effect it could to expose you to. Equally annoying, getting caught just caused a loading screen to pop and you to respawn, so on one try I was literally at the end, got the loading screen, and thought I had progressed then; nope, not today.
I think the biggest flaw here, though, might be the messaging, which isn’t effectively conveyed. The title has a text narrative that appears at a few points, but with no voice acting, I hated it. I mean, it wasn’t needed, and they would have done better to have all the filler in notes or graffiti, which keeps you fully immersed. Ultimately, though, while it is difficult to read through the subtext, this is a story about a city that was considered a national humiliation to China.
They wanted to tear it down since the 80s, but this involved uprooting people’s lives to do so. Home is home, even if it is crowded and rat-infested, and the game effectively portrays that there was life amid this filth. They may have torn the Walled City down, but the ghosts and memories linger.
Verdict
Welcome to Kowloon takes a subject that translates well to horror, but isn’t necessarily an effective game. My first thought, again, is maybe don’t tip your hand with the revelation right in the first minute, even if the runtime is only 50 minutes or so. Certain aspects you can look up on Google are treated like they should be considered twists, but maybe it’s because, as a Shenmue fanboy, I went down a Kowloon rabbit hole of information in my teens.
The second aspect that frustrates me is the controls, which just made me feel sick far too often. As a walking sim, this is THE ONE THING I need not to create issues for me; most everything else would probably be stomachable for me if that were the case.
What I keep thinking is that Welcome to Kowloon works much better as a horror movie than a game. Something with more fleshed-out characters and a slow build-up to its reveals. There is a look back at an enticing story from modern history that deserves an in-depth look, and why can’t horror be the vessel to deliver that experience? In this package, though, one might actually be more than enough.
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