Kuon review (PlayStation 2)

But even with the delayed combat and a careful, slow pace to avoid running into tempests, you can still finish Kuon in well under 10 hours. Often it's the engrossing, horror-filled narratives that keep you hooked to thriller-type games, but this isn't the case with Kuon, as it suffers from repetitious moments stemming from how the story is told. "Beating" one character's story does not end the game (and you can do this in less than three hours). You have to finish the other character's story up to the same point, and only then will you unlock a third and final chapter that provides a resolution. The problem is that the first half of each character's story plays out in the same area. You'll run into a few different characters and you'll come across some new reading materials, but otherwise the initial sections are populated with a lot of the same enemies who are doing the same things and are in the way of you getting the same necessary items from the same places. This repetitive issue, paired with the short time it takes you to get through the story, unfortunately makes the game feel shallow.

Visually, the game looks good on the whole, with faithful re-creations of period costume for the characters, and some well-detailed indoor areas in the home and the nearby shrine, with everything mostly shrouded in darkness that your lantern barely pierces. One major graphical effect is blood, and it's absolutely everywhere--splattered on the walls, smeared across the ground, and tracked through various areas. In fact, if you ever get stuck, a good way to trigger a new part of the story is to simply check for new blood trails that show a corpse has recently been pulled, bleeding, across the ground. Follow the trail, and you're sure to find some fun. The bright color offsets the general darkness of the environments nicely, as does the diseased miasma around some of your foes.

The game's central tune is a disturbing sing-song chant that comes from a pair of young twin girls you'll encounter at various points throughout your journey. Otherwise, things are mostly silent but for sudden noises to mark tempests or other creepy happenings. The characters are all fully voiced as well. You can choose to listen to the dialogue in either English or Japanese, though the Japanese of course seems to fit the setting better. The English work on the voice is solid and only grating on occasion, so it's safe enough to switch back and forth as you like.

Kuon has a genuinely creepy premise, and you'll want to see it through to its conclusion. However, that won't take you very long and there isn't a lot of replay value here. You can adjust the difficulty settings of the game between easy, normal, and hard, but it doesn't substantially change the experience. You can unlock a Japanese board game of sorts, which you can play against the CPU or against a friend, but that's about it. Given the frustrations of the slow and uneven combat system, the necessity of repeating chunks of the game to get to the ending, and the overall brevity of it, a rental period is more than enough time for the interested to glean the best points of this game.