Games

Kona is a supernatural detective story, taking place in Northern Quebec in October 1970. You play as Carl Faubert, a private investigator from Montreal and a veteran from the Korean War. He's hired by the wealthy industrialist, William Hamilton, to come to Atamipek Lake and investigate a simple vandalism issue. Most of Carl's thoughts are spoken aloud by a narrator as you play through this game.

As soon as you arrive, a car desperately trying to get out of town swerves out of control and sends you careening into the ditch. When you wake up a few hours later, a blizzard has set in and you find yourself freezing to death.

You immediately set out to warm and heal yourself so you can repair your truck and get back on the road. The other driver took out a bridge, trapping you in the town. The driver is nowhere to be found, so all you can do is continue on to your prearranged meeting with your client.

You eventually get up the road to the general store, where you were supposed to meet your employer... only to find him dead! Your detective instincts kick in and you start exploring the store for clues.

You find an unusual chunk of glowing ice behind the general store, almost as if an iceberg came out of the ground (see first screenshot). There are wolf tracks leading away from it, but when you take a picture of it, you discover hidden moose tracks alongside it too.

Following the various trails of glowing ice and hidden moose tracks, you will occasionally find completely frozen people - encased in ice from head to toe! Walking up to them will start a vision, showing you what they were up to before they were frozen.

The screen started pulsing uncomfortably with a heavy heartbeat sound every time I got close to them, so I avoided them at first, thinking I would freeze or die or something. It wasn't until I accidentally wandered too close and started a vision that I realized I was missing out on story-advancing clues.

As you uncover more clues, you scribble in more details on your map of Atamipek Lake, giving you more places to explore.

You also discover that Atamipek Lake is mostly a ghost town, with everyone either frozen, having fled, or are dead. There is one living person I came across early on; a surly old French man who's defending himself from the "hybrid wolf/moose creature" in the woods that's freezing everyone. He has some folklore books on his table about Wendigos and what creates one, which I suspect is either a clue as to what's happening, or possibly a red herring.

Either way, the old man gives you a proper winter coat if you go find him a bottle of Caribou (a sort of bootleg alcohol one of the residents was making in their cabin).

I've only played 3-1/2 hours of this game so far (and most of it was spent wandering in the woods or rummaging through abandoned houses), but it's been quite enjoyable. You learn about each of the townsfolk and their motives against William Hamilton. Being a rich guy who swooped in and took over the town, he's not very well liked, so there are plenty of motives for the people to kill him.

I also like that there's a driving aspect to this game. You can walk around in the cold, but you need to occasionally warm yourself and drink/eat to keep your brain power up. And when the cold is affecting you, you can't move fast. So being able to climb into a truck and quickly drive cross-country to the nearest house is convenient. And I do love driving in games.

All of the text in this game is in French, with an automatic English translation popping up over it. I'm not sure if this was originally a French game and/or made by a French developer, or if they were just trying to be authentic to Northern Quebec, a French-speaking region of Canada. But I do enjoy the authenticity of seeing everything in French. The narrator speaks in English, and the old man you run into speaks French, but with English captions.

There's apparently a sequel to this game that released in October last year - Kona II: Brume. It follows Carl again as he explores the same region, trying to explore the reality-altering "brume" (French for mist or haze) that covers the region and isolates it from the rest of the world. Sounds almost like a tribute to Silent Hill.

And both games are on sale on Steam right now. 80% off for this game; 70% off for the sequel. If this sounds like your kind of game, it's only a few bucks right now, so now's the time to check it out.