Kuon (2004)

Finished the Yin route last night, and I suspect I'm 2/3rds through Yang now.

The way Kuon's lighting engine causes its colors to bleed makes it one of the best-looking games on PS2.

Even the loading screens are beautiful.

If only I had functional limbs.

A cutscene.

Started my next game. Like any Souls fan, I've wanted to check out FromSoftware's back catalogue. This seemed among the most compelling, and the double-dip of horror after The Tairyou Jigoku made me worry about burning out, but I do need to make a dent in the PS2's massive horror library.

My concerns were assuaged by first impressions, which is that this seems to be cut from the cloth of Resident Evil. There's more of a focus on action gameplay mechanics; it's not just an adventure game. I'm playing on hard mode and haven't died yet, but bosses will be the real test.

To summarize, it's been a very typical survival horror game so far, albeit a consummate one. It's most excellent trait is its visuals: this is one of the best-looking games I've played on PS2. The lighting is phenomenal.

Recently, I discovered this rare PS2 game called Kuon, an early title of the well-known Developer/Publisher From Software. Being a huge fan of the Horror game genre, I knew I just had to give the game a playthrough. I'd read that Kuon suffered from poor critic reviews at launch and there was not much in terms of player interest beyond the obvious rarity, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I finally sat down to play through the game. Kuon, at its core, is both a marvel and a bit tedious, a product of the gaming era in which it was created. Below I will share my thoughts on what was done well, what was not done well, and why I gave it the score that I did.

The Good

• Story:

  The narrative is divided into three chapters, each told by a different character with their own view of the situation. The first two parts are available right away and given the names Yin and Yang. Yin places you in the shoes of Utsuki, a daughter of Ashiya Doman, an Onmyōji who went to Fujiwara Manor to investigate the claim of a supposed curse that had befallen the Fujiwara clan. The other story follows Sakuya, an Onmyōji-in-training under the care of Utsuki's father. Completing these stories unlocks a third chapter, aptly named Kuon, and follows another character that I'll not name to avoid any potential spoilers. I played Yin first and I would suggest to any would-be gamers that this seems like the logical progression of the story, even though there is strong evidence that many (if not all) of the events in Yang took place first in the chronological order of things. I found the story gripping and engaging as I explored the rooms of the Fujikawa Manor and pieced together hints from the various writing collectibles scattered throughout the game. While the game did not provide any gripping action or true jumpscares, the story seemed to progress at an even and entertaining pace and kept me hunting for more clues as to what happened in the Manor. From the moment that Utsuki and her sister Kareha first entered the compound to the final showdown, I was hooked.

• Atmosphere:

  The true gem of this game is the set pieces that the characters traverse during the course of their narratives. The Fujikawa Manor was a fantastic backdrop for this creepy tale, providing a variety of ominous locations. Walls, and floors painted in smears of blood, darkness that felt heavy and oppressive, pushing on the meager lighting each protagonist carried. I felt like the devs went above and beyond with the setting. From the occasional room with flies buzzing around the hanging lanterns to paper screens with careful Kanji script. Places where claws marred the walls, suggesting that something terrible lurked in the darkness. Objects moved about the manor as character stories overlapped. In addition to the carefully crafted set pieces, the sound for Kuon was top-notch. Often, many more modern games just slap a sound byte into a game to suggest the presence of things happening around the protagonist. (Gunfire in CoD anyone?) Kuon, however, provides several situations where eerie chanting or strange sounds have a direct origin somewhere within the Manor. This was a very nice touch. Sometimes, the sound byte gives a hint of something lost, such as the brief laughter and music when you enter the party room area, despite the massacre that is discovered, adding depth to the ambiance. Overall, the atmosphere of Kuon was surprisingly topnotch, though considering other games that came later in the From Software library, perhaps this is not really that surprising after all.

• Gameplay:

  Kuon offers a variety of combat options in the form of cards, which provide a single-use spell. Some cards are ranged magical attacks and some cards will summon forth a minion of various types to aid the protagonist. I found the large variety of card options to be interesting and fun to use. It was entertaining to use a card for the first time just to discover what would happen. In addition to the cards, each character possesses their own short-range weapon, which seems to deal a small amount of damage and has the bonus effect of disrupting an enemy's attack. Very useful for enemies that cast their own spells. Exploration was done through a fixed camera most of the time, which was no surprise considering the era in which the game was released and the other horror games that shared space on the store shelf. However, I never found the camera angle to be frustrating. I was never attacked by a monster off-screen that I couldn't see because my camera was staring at a wall. However, there were times that I desperately wished I could look at things from the protagonist's view. Another welcome mechanic was the addition of dashing. The game would punish you for using this in the longterm, which is vertigo and health damage. Not to mention, making noise and toppling things that summoned additional enemies. All in all, considering the age and the era of the game, the tanky controls were perfectly acceptable.

The Bad:

• My only real gripe is the combat. Sure, the game provides a variety of spells to use in combat, but I found most of these to be pointless. In fact, I killed the vast majority of the monsters in the gain using only each protagonist's melee weapon. This is especially true in the later parts of each chapter when the protagonist locates their final weapon. Even more compelling is the grapple technique. Enemies that draw close will grapple your character and you can throw them off without incurring damage. I found a solid tactic where I could simply back enemies into tight spaces and force them to grapple me, then shove them and carve them up with my melee weapon, barely giving them a chance to retaliate. Even if the enemies are doubled up, you can grapple the nearest one and throw it into its partner, causing them both to stagger. It's hard to be concerned about demons and ghosts when you spend every encounter pushing them around like a schoolyard bully. To make matters worse, many of the bosses you encounter during the course of the game hit insanely hard, which would make them dangerous.... except.. You can spam your attack move with your melee weapon to disrupt bosses casting spells. For some bosses, I found, that if I stood in a specific spot, I could completely avoid being attacked altogether. (For real, I watched one boss throwing fireball after fireball into a column as I cut him up. I watched another boss endlessly jump up and down off a rocky outcrop as I burned him alive from complete safety.) So, all in all, play Kuon for the ambiance and the story, not the challenge.

Typo Anyone?

The Ugly:

• Kuon was received with limited production, poor sales, and poor reviews by critics in 2004. (For real, did these people play RE or Silent Hill? A lot of the same mechanics are applied here.) Because of this, Kuon is considered by many as something called a Holy Grail, which means people selling it on sites like eBay get to ask for a pile of cash in return. Unfortunately, the only current method to experience this gem on the PS2 is to pay the exorbitant price. However, with so many developers now remastering and releasing their old libraries on digital platforms like Steam, perhaps there is always the chance this gem will have a digital cousin someday.

Conclusion:

• If you like slow burn horror, Japanese culture, and tanky, fixed-camera games from the late 90s/early 2Ks, I would highly recommend this game. I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish and while combat was easy and the bosses were easy to manipulate, I found the story gripping and worth the effort of braving Fujikawa Manor. I gave it five stars because the pros completely outweigh the cons and this game was an absolutely satisfying bite from the past.

Kuon is a PS2 era Survival Horror game set in Heian era Japan, a period when the country was still influenced by Chinese culture, but finding its own distinct identity evident in flourishing arts and increasingly complex society and government. The horror of the game has a notably Japanese vibe and I found the cultural immersion one of the best parts as I really felt like I was planted firmly in a creepy version of a very different time and place throughout the game, all the more intensified by the eerie vibes that pervade the environments. It's also rather lucky that I just happened to be reading The Tale of Genji while playing this game, which was also set (and authored) in the same period.

The story of Kuon I found to be rather intriguing. The basic premise is pretty easy to follow and the disturbing mythology of the evil forces in the game is enthralling and clear enough. It's one of those narratives that isn't super colorful and exciting, but has a very subdued haunting tone in which you don't bother to hope for a happy ending, but at best to survive without facing too horrible a fate. We follow two main characters for most of the game: Utsuki, a shrine maiden whose father is the esteemed seer, Doman; and Sakuya, an exorcist—and one of Doman's disciples—investigating the strange happenings at the Fujiwara manor. Utsuki's game is called the "Yin" phase whereas Sakuya's is the "Yang" phase. At the manor, we encounter numerous wicker boxes full of silken webbing, monsters called "gaki," Mulberry trees that produce magical silkworms, and all manner of other ghosts and monsters. I don't want to spoil too much of the story specifics, but in both playthroughs, you work to uncover the mystery of the manor Lord Fujiwara's disappearance, as well as other hauntings on the grounds, while trying to understand Doman's suspicious behavior. If you complete both characters' games, you unlock a short "Kuon" phase that leads to the true ending. While I found the lore and mystery-uncovering really engaging, the game can still be rather confusing and opaque. The basic premise of much of it I found easy enough to follow so that it was still intriguing, but after watching some explanatory videos on YouTube, I discovered several major elements that I totally missed. Funnily enough, one of the videos I watched closed essentially saying "honestly even I'm still not totally sure wtf was going on in this game," stressing how even a seemingly-complete interpretation of the story still harbors great uncertainty. I'm glad the game made enough sense to be interesting to me during my playthrough, but some aspects of the story were unnecessarily difficult to parse and could have used a lot more transparency in portraying a story with a ton of potential without dumbing things down too much.

I will not pretend to be an expert either on this game's lore or Japanese history, but I found the setting of the game and its themes to be in an interesting (and likely intentional) parallel, especially after doing some cursory research. I don't want to spoil too much of the horrific lore of the game, but much of it involves brutal rebirth and synthesis. In Japanese, "kuon" can mean either "nine grudges" or "eternity" and both of these meanings hold great significance for the lore of the game and to these concepts of repeated arising aiming at something more fixed and lasting. But further, these themes seem especially pertinent to the Heian period. Not only is the yin-yang aspect that gives the characters' playthroughs their names derivative of Chinese Taoism—a cultural undercurrent Japan was incorporating, but evolving from—it also stresses some of the duality inherent to the game's synthesis themes. On that note, yin-yang philosophy was also influential in developing Japan's own onmyōdō school of astronomy and spiritualism (which defines the magic employed in the game) and represents the symbiotic relationship of opposing forces in harmony as well as the interplay of the five elements. This relationship further metaphorically mirrors Kuon's thematic narrative of growth/rebirth through murder, absorption, and consumption into some form of co-existence. The game takes place when Japan was undergoing a transition iterating on past traditions and becoming something new. Much like the silkworms rising from their cocoons, Japanese culture was metamorphizing toward its own distinct identity. Destruction acts as the seed of creation both on the societal, cultural, and personal level. Further, the lord of the game's manor, Lord Fujiwara, bears the name of the most prominent clan of the Heian period, essentially kingmakers in Heian politics. This is a fitting parallel to how the in-game Lord Fujiwara is killed before the game begins, but is rather gruesomely "incorporated" quite literally into the character arcs of Kuon.

I rather enjoyed the characters in this game. Sakuya was definitely my favorite (the title of this review is what she says over and over when she meditates to recover health). In part, she had the best voice acting, which helped with her characterization, but also she's a good heroic character with a cool aesthetic and her emphasis on spell-casting helped make shine one of the more unique aspects of the game. Utsuki probably has the more interesting story though. This makes both playthroughs interesting in their own right and unlike Resident Evil 1 and 2, I wouldn't really consider playing as just one of them to really be a "full" playthrough, especially considering there's a third playthrough only accessible after playing both yin and yang games. Utsuki is not a character I particularly like as a person, but her dark story delivers well the narrative's tone. I also really like how all three playable characters are complex and capable women. Sakuya faces sexism from her own origins in a family that considers its female spiritualists to be inferior—which is proved false by the story's leaving her the sole survivor of her otherwise-male group—and yet rises above it to be a confident altruist who manages to be rather bad ass throughout the game. Further, Abe no Seimei—a legendary historical figure and master astrologer of this era—is gender swapped to be another powerful and competent woman in the game and acts as the third playable character. On that note, Doman is also a legendary historical figure, the evil rival to Abe no Seimei, a role he plays in this game as well. As a last random aside on the characters, Utsuki's sister, Kureha (pronounced kind of like "coo-ray-haw") is an important character to Utsuki's story especially and she's mentioned by name a lot in the game. However, the English dub consistently pronounces her name as "Korea," which was really funny.

Gameplay is where Kuon has some interesting ideas, but overall doesn't do so hot. On the interesting side, your characters mostly fight using spells in place of the guns commonplace in this genre's iconic games set in more modern times. There are a good number of spells in the game, generally coming in the form of summons or attack spells. This felt pretty different, but despite there being a good number of different cards to cast from, the spells felt fairly similar and mostly just varied by strength. The combat is also very clunky and unresponsive with attack wind-ups taking far too long, causing you to take damage that feels unfair. Further, the game features a meditation mechanic which allows you to take a few passive seconds to regain your composure, healing you fully without using any items. This isn't really feasible much in combat, but it did make the overall Survival Horror mechanic of resource management far simpler when healing items were really only something to be used in combat. While the environments are interesting and immersive, the various playthroughs not only involve a ton of backtracking, but at least Utsuki and Sakuya's routes are extremely similar. That's not uncommon to games like Resident Evil 1 and 2 with multiple playable character routes, but it felt like way more of a chore to replay in this one, despite the characters controlling quite differently and having distinct stories that rarely directly interact. There are a few puzzles in Kuon, but while I generally really like puzzles in horror games, these seemed to vary between extremely easy and unnecessarily difficult, neither of which felt great.

I found the overall presentation of the game strong. The soundtrack doesn't have too many distinct memorable tracks, but for a score of spooky ambient background music, it's on-point and effective. The environments are also rather evocative, despite lacking in variety. The architecture of the period is noticeable, but different areas manage to look rather distinct. The characters are also pretty well-defined and are easy to keep track of given their distinct appearance and style, with the only exceptions being purposeful (ie Sakuya's group of exorcists all wear similar yellow garb). Cutscenes are mostly in-engine and aren't especially impressive, and as my "Korea" anecdote may indicate, the dub isn't great, though it isn't as bad as some of these early Survival Horror games either. One thing I disliked was that in cutscenes, characters' mouths don't move at all. I realize lip-syncing wasn't super common at this time and it probably would've been mismatched given the dubbing anyway, but with the number of close-ups, it looked a little unintentionally uncanny when characters were talking with their mouths closed. Otherwise, for a PS2 game, Kuon has pretty good presentation that really sells the rather potent spooky atmosphere.

In the end, I found the general gameplay of Kuon to be disappointing, but the game on the whole was quite enjoyable. Even though it's a short game, having to do so much backtracking and solving the exact same puzzles for both main characters really felt like a chore. That gameplay is a significant chunk of your experience with the game and pretty much sealed the deal for me on this not being a 5-star title. However, there's so much that still feels unique about the setting and world-building that it impressively still managed to be a comfortable 4-star game for me. Admittedly, I think most PS1/PS2 era Survival Horror games are going to likely be 3 stars or better for me unless they really muck it up. And despite its uniqueness in some areas, Kuon still manages to feel fairly mediocre—if not "bad"—as to its merits as a Survival Horror title. But still, I think it's worth a chance as despite the clunky gameplay and repetitive routing, Kuon manages to be a unique blend between familiar and strange that provokes engagement with themes that overlay the fascinating time and place it depicts.