Welcome to Kowloon Review

Axyos Games, Welcome to Kowloon

Stop. If you’re not familiar with Kowloon’s Walled City (KWC), head to Google or YouTube and do some background reading as it needs to be seen to be believed. One of the densest areas of land to ever exist, within the size of just 4 football pitches, estimates place up to 50,000 people lived there. Completely ungoverened, rampant with crime and other vice and its own culture, the British and Chinese ruling authorities of Hong Kong showed a lack of interest in the city.

What essentially was a self-ruling enclave, KWC blocked out the daylight for the majority of its residents. Combined with the lack of basic sanitation for many, the City’s limited water and other commodities would have been enough to send any of its unfortunate residents crazy. Enough of the brief history lesson! Welcome to Kowloon (WtK) takes this fascinating, almost unbelievable place as a location for a brief, genuinely terrifying walking simulator. As the game has now arrived on console, is it worth your time? Our spoiler-lite review.

Kowloony Bin

KWC has attracted the media’s imagination and in gaming, the City has featured in the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and Stray. With its claustrophobic streets, tiny apartments patchy artificial lighting, it’s a surprise KWC hasn’t previously been adapted to the horror genre.

WtK’s story is of a young student who arrives to Hong Kong to study. Like most students, broke and willing to accept something with questionable levels of comfort and cleanliness, our nameless character pulls up to KWC to find their temporary accommodation in this compacted concrete juggernaut. As the game begins we head into the lower streets before heading upstairs to our room. The happenings that befall this poor freshman from there are enough to make anyone a college dropout, and me drop my controller.

Across its approximately one hour run time, the student discovers that within the walls, not all is as it appears. And upon the discovery of a note talking about an old lady not being quite what she seems, is now on an urgent mission to escape Kowloon. It’s a short game so I don’t want to go much further into the story which is competent for a budget indie.

The handful of additive, backstory-filling notes littered around KWC help move our story forward and create quite a lot of fear in what’s going to be around the next corner. Scrawled on the grey corridor walls are cries for help and others laying blame on the government for the standards the City’s stateless residents endure. It appears that there is a moral message left by the developers, that three decades since the demolition, an animosity remains to the ruling authority’s blasé attitude to human rights and the repercussions it had on the peoples of KWC.

It’s in the Walls

Simply put, WtK is a combat-less, horror walking simulator. Entirely linear, with limited backtracking to find newly (creaky) open doors, the game also includes a few very simplistic small puzzles to solve – nothing you haven’t seen elsewhere. It uses its unique setting to create immense fear in the player, a place with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide and a path you must follow forward.

The streets, walls and apartment blocks of KWC are truly terrifying in this title. So much so that during my playthrough I could see goosebumps on my legs and began to feel clammy on my head as the fear of dread builds. Like the best horror games, KWC always feels like you’re a second away from being jumped on, chased or screamed in the face by some unfathomable being. I should add that the environments are, mostly, of a high graphical standard too.

Welcome to Kowloon — The City of Kowloon is very well designed, graphically and

I’ve watched many documentaries about KWC and from my knowledge, WtK is a very well-realised vision of the City. Thick cables run through the corridors like tangled veins, stairwells are concrete and brutalist, whereas the outfacing balconies that were afforded to so few, stare out towards freedom. There is even a haunting, very small child’s playground in what would have one of the few non-developed metres of land. If you’re someone who struggles with claustrophobic settings, you may find this game intimidating. Though on the flipside, there are horror game enthusiasts who will find such spaces a riveting game setting.

Creeping through the game, you will see glimpses of demonised humans popping their heads around corners, but they move so quickly that you don’t even have time to react. There are indeed jump scares, the first of which truly caught me off guard. But, unlike some other games of this ilk, they never felt too frequent or out of place. Later in the game you’ll reach an incredibly creepy section where you’re following written clues from an unknown writer to an item you need. Following the clues you’re invited to open fridges, overturn rocks and other actions, and it really built up true suspense for me.

What I was very impressed by was that the game’s flashlight is moved around like a real flashlight, not simply in a direct line ahead of the player. It gives an added level of fear as you can’t quickly turn and face your limited light source at something, or someone, who is staring at you around a door frame.

Technical Challenges

For a short game that arrived on Steam three years ago, I would have expected the console port of Welcome to Kowloon to perform well. Unfortunately, there are some technical issues which did hamper my experience. The game suffers from brief input delay, whilst there some notable cuts in audio. Furthermore, I did experience a hard to-dashboard crash at the very end of the game. fortunately, when I reloaded WtK I was at the same location and didn’t have to play through from the start.

Not necessarily a technical bug, rather a design flaw is the way in which some the games doors open. You’ll pass through many doors in the game, some of which just didn’t seem to: 1) open fully; or 2) open the way you would expect, thus making it a pain to squeeze through at times.

Final Thoughts

Welcome to Kowloon is one the better horror walking simulators I have played in recent times. Whilst offering little new mechanically, it does an exceptional job of nailing its setting in design, and in using it to build unease and anxiety in the player. Peering round tight corners of the City, there is just the right amount of jump scares, chases and other eerie happenings so that they never felt old.

I would recommend WtK to any fans of the short-form, horror walking simulator genre.