The first Kona game was a fun, little detective adventure set in the Great White North. I remember it having an alright mystery and cool vibe. Even though I lamented not being able to explore the northern part of the map, I didn’t expect a sequel. But I was looking through a Steam sale the other day and saw Kona 2: Brume for sale. Since I didn’t hate the first game, I decided to give this one a go.

Kona 2 was released about 6 years after the first one and you can see they took that time to update some of the graphics. The first game’s design I wouldn’t call low-poly, but it was much more angular and artistic. Here in Kona 2 the art style goes for a more realistic art design. There’s more detail to the world and wolves aren’t quite as blocky. The gameplay feels smoother too in regards to combat and simply interacting with the world. This extra coat of polish does serve the game well. It has less of that “shoestring budget indie game” feel to it and more of a “competently made AA game”.

The first game was a mix of walking sim & survival game, Kona 2 was streamlined to lean more into the walking sim side. You still have to manage your warmth levels and avoid exposure to the cold. That is something tied to the setting, so its exclusion would be an odd choice. It trickles down slowly, so you can spend long stretches in the wilderness without heat. The sanity meter did not make it over to the sequel though. I barely remembered it from the first game. I think its removal is a good thing, they use the environment and storytelling more to affect your mood vs seeing the “It’s scary now” meter go down. Another change is you no longer have your truck or snowmobile anymore, but around the end of the first act you do get a dog sled to traverse the Canadian wilderness with. The inventory management and distracting wolves with steaks have also been cut out. Your in-world map from the first game is replaced with an overlay map, which does address one of my complaints with the original, you can now check your map while in a vehicle.

A big change to the sequel is the world space. The first game was contained to a small village in Quebec where you drove the gameplay by just exploring all the abandoned houses, very walking sim like. In Kona 2, you are exploring the northern area of that original map and then some. You spend a lot of time in the wilderness, feeling very much like the Long Dark. The game still nails the atmosphere of a snowy forest. During the heavy snowstorm, there were times where I spooked myself as I saw distant shapes silhouetted in the mist. I’ve always enjoyed the beauty of a mysterious snowy forest over a sunny beach. As you go about the world there are set piece places for you to explore, like a tycoon’s mansion, a underground laboratory, or a radio station. While it is impressive to see them expanding their game world like this, I do miss that homespun feel the original small town had.

That’s probably my biggest issue with Kona 2, it falls into that sequel trap of trying to do too much. The first game was a grounded, Longmire-esque, detective game in rural Canada. I’d classify it as folk horror, helped by the narrator, who was perfect for a folksy detective game. He had an old voice and knew when to be a bit flippant and when to be serious. The ending leaned into the supernatural legends of the area, but overall, there was a sense of dread because the world felt real. You were a regular guy in a town that was eerily abandoned.

For Kona 2, we’ve got a new narrator. The first narrator sounded like someone who’d narrate old Modern Marvel episodes, this new narrator sounds like he came from narrating episodes of Mountain Men. His voice is probably more in line with what your main character would sound like, but it’s not his internal monologue. I still think it would make more sense for a detective game to have the inner thoughts of the detective narrating vs an omniscient 3rd person narrator. The world also feels a bit fantastical now. Most of northern Quebec is under snow and survivors are huddled up in little holdouts. Not to compare it to Long Dark again, but Kona 2 shares that same “quiet apocalypse” vibe with it. The plot feels much grander than our small-time detective and loses that grounded feeling. There was one point where I had to visit another town and I was hoping I’d get some of that exploration I got from Kona 1, but all the houses are snowed close. I try to remember that I shouldn’t dislike something just because it’s different from the other thing. That just stifles creativity, but this game gets wacky.

I don’t know if I’d consider this one a horror game. I do usually conflate the horror genre with games that include gore, grotesque monsters, or jump scares, but I have enjoyed a good psychological horror game on occasion. Kona 2 doesn’t even feel like that. There’s a few spooky moments, but I didn’t have that overwhelming sense of dread or concerned that I was going to be killed at the next turn. I remember I was leaving one level and thought “Yeah, this seems like the point where the bad guy’s going to show up and chase me”, but no. I get that being a sequel, the cat is kinda out of the bag, we’ve seen the big scary thing at the first game’s climax. Trying to recapture that lightning wouldn’t work, but the game instead pivots into science fiction.

Alright, let’s just talk about the story. First, spoilers for Kona 1’s ending, least what I remember. You find out that the tycoon that hired you, Hamilton, was killed by the town doctor because Hamilton was responsible for his wife’s death, and some locals accidently killed a Cree woman while hunting and covered it up. Her boyfriend, stricken by grief, turned into a Wendigo and started freezing people to death. Our detective, Carl Faubert, runs into the Wendigo, then promptly runs away from it. He makes it to a boat and sets out to the lake where he’s spotted by survivors. There was a lot of map left unexplored, and a few questions unanswered, but overall, I was okay with the ending. Kona 2 picks up right at that moment in the boat. Carl finds out the survivors aren’t friendly, and he dives in the water as they fire upon him. This serves as the reason you don’t have all your gear from Kona 1. The game starts off strong in setting the mood as you wade through the cold water and sneak into a cabin before freezing to death. After a night’s sleep, you head off towards Hamilton’s manor with only a flashlight, hatchet, and a half-loaded revolver.

The trek to Hamilton’s manor is one of the game’s high points, oozing in atmosphere. The wild animals are much less aggressive and giving them a wide berth is usually all that’s needed. There’re a few little abandoned cabins you can explore on your way, but the first big set piece you explore is Hamilton’s manor. I don’t know if it’s because I was still learning the ropes, but it seems like Hamilton’s manor takes up a good half of the game. You finally get to investigate the vandalism, but the main point here is to learn about Hamilton’s secrets. After that you hear a radio call from a group of survivors, you go up north to visit them and a scientist among them has an idea on how to stop the snowstorm and get rid of the Wendigo. There will be spoilers for Kona 2 sprinkled from here on out. See, it turns out that Hamilton was mining more than copper. He had discovered some type of magical space rock that crashed to earth millennia ago, Mistanite. It was a potent power source, and he was in deals with the Soviets. Under his copper mine, Hamilton built a lab to experiment with Mistanite, even having his reactor powered by it. Before it's name was revealed I expected Hamilton had discovered some Uranium.

That’s Carl Faubert’s next stop, the underground lab. It’s around this point that I asked myself, “What am I doing?”. Kona as a series excels at the rustic, spooky winter atmosphere, wandering around a lab that looks a little too modern for the 1970 time period is not playing to their strengths. They do their best work with log cabins, not concrete bunkers. I was a little disillusioned with Kona 2 by the time I left that lab and then, like rubbing salt into the wound, the scientist builds Carl a ray gun to fight the Wendigo, because the Wendigo, & the ice wolves you’ve been fighting, aren’t supernatural entities as old as the land. Instead, they are just manifestations from Carl’s mind caused by the Mistanite radiation. I don’t know if this was the developers’ intended story all along or if they felt they had to put in another big twist, but trying to overexplain the supernatural twist with sci-fi just falls flat.

With the realism goes the suspense. Now, I enjoy a spoopy folklore game that is more about neat supernatural things vs scaring people. If Kona set out leaning more into the supernatural early on, being a bit pulpy, or setting up Carl Faubert as a detective who’s into the paranormal, like Mulder, I would probably enjoy this turn into fantasy. But since Carl plays it straight, being handed a ray gun is a shark jump moment. Anyways, you take the ray gun to the heart of the storm to fight the Wendigo and save Northern Quebec. This is one of the more suspenseful moments in the game. You’ve got to activate some beacons while being stalked by the Wendigo. You can buy some time with your ray gun, but it will continue to harass you. It’s only after you attach a sci-fi device to the radio tower that the Wendigo is weakened enough for Carl Faubert to finish off before he passes out.

Carl wakes up to a clear sky outside a mountaintop cabin. Laying against a tree is the body of the boyfriend we learned about from the first game, Corbo, dressed in the Wendigo’s garb. A helicopter then comes to rescue Carl, and that’s the game. There’re some items left up to interpretation. I assume Corbo was actually a Wendigo, because we see the physical results of his rampage. But with Kona 2 mixing up the supernatural with sci-fi, what caused his transformation is unknown. On a philosophical level, there’s a very present theme of loss and obsession. Hamilton the tycoon is obsessed with the Mistanite, even as it gives him cancer, and ignores his wife until she passes away. Corbo is driven by grief to focus solely on destroying Hamilton’s enterprise. Carl Faubert never really gets a story. He’s one of those detective characters who comes in to observe the story, not be a part of it. Another big theme is environmentalism, as Hamilton’s strip mining has destroyed the natural area and upset the local Indian tribes. Hamilton’s scientists are foolishly experimenting with Mistanite, testing it out on the local wildlife.

I also wish I remembered the names of the townsfolk from the first game. You meet some NPCs and find lots of letters to read & I don’t know if any of them are references to those townsfolks and their fates. You do find little models of the snowmobile and truck from the first game. There’s only one flashback sequence at the manor, that I thought would be used more often, but no. It had a cool feature. Carl was hallucinating he was outside at a totem pole, but if you took pictures with your camera, the photos still showed you were inside Hamilton’s trophy room.

All in all, on the gameplay side, Kona 2: Brume is an improvement. The game looks nicer and the combat isn’t as cumbersome. The world maintains that snowy, mysterious atmosphere. The voice acting is all top-notch. The first Kona has a better story. Again, it’s hard to maintain suspense for the sequel of your horror game, but they veer off the road in an attempt to make a new mystery to unravel. I was excited at the idea of concluding the Kona story by exploring the northern section of the map, but I didn’t care for its direction. If you can get Kona 2 on a deep sale, it’s not a terrible game, but it’s not a must-play. I’d say you can just believe Carl Faubert was rescued by the survivors when he hopped into that boat, and still live a full life.