Kowloon's Curse: Lost Report Review

Today, I continue my streak of reviewing short, free, single-player games in lieu of writing actually-interesting blog posts or code¹. Last night, I finished Kowloon's Curse: Lost Report, a prequel to an upcoming Kowloon's Curse video game. I found this game via Xitter, and have had it on my to-play list for some months, but have been distracted by other things.

In Kowloon's Curse: Lost Report, you play as Tony, a blond thug working for an unnamed gang headed by a mysterious figure named "The Inspector"². After an odd dream in which you set up some of your basic stats through dialogue choices, you awake in a dingy apartment featuring a bare mattress on the floor, a computer, a TV, and a pile of open instant noodle containers in the kitchen³. You make your way down to the payphone in the courtyard of your apartment building, where you are tasked with getting with your partner⁴ and recovering a briefcase from a nightclub. After your buddy fucks that up, you take the fall and are tasked with shaking down a mahjong player for debts owed to The Inspector. After you fuck that up, the game resets with a few differences.

The aesthetics are good. As any game set in the Kowloon Walled City⁵ should be, it's dark and mostly lit by neon signs. The difference, though, between it and Cyberpunk 2077 or suchlike is the all-pervading griminess which gives it a Let It Die feel, as dirt encrusts the buildings and smog fills the air. This is assisted by the graphics, which are in the PS1 style of early 3D that the nostalgia wave has crashed against with tiresome predictability. Unfortunately for the game, I wasn't around for that era of graphics, but luckily, the graphics serve the vibe of the game, which is explicitly online and a bit parodic⁶. Serial Experiments Lain references litter the game (the voiceover that plays whenever you start a new run is the same PlainTalk Whisper voice that Lain opens its episodes with, interacting with the computer in your apartment nets you an achievement named "Wired", and the DJ in the club the first mission is set it is a replica of the DJ from Lain), and the web browser on you computer includes a 4chan clone whose users speak in the traditional channer style.

The story isn't terrible, either. It's very surreal, with most NPCs being blank human-shaped sillouettes, and more than a few being weird-looking creatures unlike you or any of your compatriots that talk and act the same as humans. However, no attention is paid to this, and eventually you begin to go with the flow. Oh, the bouncer at the club is a big telephone box. Whatever. The staff rooms are Egyptian-themed with hieroglpyhs on the walls, and a merchant discussing how he's out of business until he figures out the new regulations on the sale of mummy paraphernalia. Cool, now let me find a way to open this door so I can rob a motherfucker.

The weird-looking creatures and blank NPCs serve a gameplay purpose, too. You have no map, just an objective to do something to someone, and you have to naturally navigate the city as you would IRL (taking the metro, looking at street signs, etc), and it's thus useful to have a clear distinction between NPCs you can and can't interact with. Unfortunately, it quickly goes downhill from there. The controls are horrific, a System Shock-esque setup where W and S work normally, but A and D turn you and you need to use Z and C to strafe. The mouse doesn't control the camera, unless you press R, where you can zoom in to look at things, but the sensitivity is so high⁷ that you'll make a few strafing runs before you can line the cursor up on your target. It uses a block-based movement arrangement, NetHack-esque, and presumably nicked from the Japanese adventure games it explicitly tries to ape, but the hand movement required is just annoying and ruins the flow.

Meanwhile, menu navigation⁸ is even worse. Sometimes Space works to select a button or skip dialogue, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes M1 works to select something, and sometimes it doesn't, but it never skips dialogue. Enter always works, but there are too many layers of menus between where you begin and where you actually select your action, and the "stack" isn't shown.

A tutorial for the combat system wouldn't have gone amiss, either. Sure, the basic attack enemy/consume item loop is pretty well ingrained in modern gaming, but the Talk and Skill menus are not given their due weight. I was at the final boss fight of the game before I found out what the "crying" status effect was supposed to do⁹, but the way I had managed to get it to work hadn't been explained at all¹⁰.

It may be unfair to harp on these things, since the game is supposed to be replayed a million times. After the end of the initial story, the game resets to the beginning, with some cosmetic changes to your apartment being made and new dialogue options, so it's likely that the developers want for players to open up the city and its lore run by run. Unfortunately for them, I started playing at about 2200 and ran through the game in under 80 minutes, and don't have much reason to come back¹¹, so sacrificing the first impression in favor of trying to incentivize replay may have been an own goal. Still, it's free and under a gig, so you might as well download it and give it a whirl.