Kona is somewhat difficult to describe, to fit in a more or less defined description, which is partially due to what interesting things it tries to do and be many things at once, and partially due to how it mostly fails at being good at anything it tries to be. It’s a story exploration game, it’s an adventure game, it’s a survival game and thematically it’s a bit horror, a bit of a murder mystery and a bit of a folk tale. It heavily borrows ideas and elements from other titles, but at the same time tries to be a thing of its own. And I want to like it, because it’s very much not a bad game, but I can’t.
So, let’s get the mechanics out of the way first. There’s a rather big open location for you to explore, full of points of interest that are not that hard to find (and some more hidden things you might stumble upon). As you run around, you gather stuff and try not to get cold or get killed by wolves in a snowy environment – that’s where the survival aspect comes in. And it seems that the developers tried to make it more like in Deadly Premonition – where it’s nagging enough for you to care about it, but not annoying like a lot of survival games tend to get, yet the limited inventory space and extremely precise use of some of the items you find kills the “not annoying” part outright. So you go somewhere and might encounter a block that needs a very specific tool and then you find that tool and run around with it not knowing if you can put it away or you will need to use it somewhere else soon as well, while also being at risk of finding something else that you want to grab and not being able to unless you throw away or put away some of the stuff that you have. And it feels less of a “survival” or “fun exploration” with “solving problems” and more of a chore. Especially when you have titles like Near Death that work with similar ideas so much better.
Story and mood-wise, on the other hand, it tries to have the murder mystery, except it goes nowhere interesting. It tries to keep the events suspenseful, except the surreal and unnatural events make things less interesting, unlike what you get in, say, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Cryostasis from which this game “borrows” dying people memories story mechanic (and rather poorly). Also unlike the games mentioned, the tone of the game is often all over the place, with the narration seemingly trying to emulate the quirkiness of the Coens’ movies, yet often not being particularly well written or, due to the order of narration being player dependent, feeling completely out of place in a bad way. And while I do admire the desire of the developers to make this some kind of “Canadian wilderness magic realist modern folk tale” with their interesting local stories, culture and history to show, it just doesn’t work in the end.
And that’s ignoring all of the little irritations like strange sudden loading pauses mid-game, a lot of interaction points being very particular about positioning and controls often feeling off. Kona is a game that starts as something that could be promising, slowly devolves into rather boring run across the barren snowy land that could be much more interesting that it is in game, and ends without any kind of satisfactory ending. It’s a great idea that could’ve led to a very interesting game. But didn’t.